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Anybody in Cornwall, with a sense of Cornish history, must have felt a rush of sympathy in the wake of the Welsh mine tragedy this week.

Several strands of thought came together for us. It was a week in which my partner was teaching her students about a Cornish miner, aged nine, sent down into the dark to hack his living from the rock in Victorian times. It was a week in which I read a beautiful new story which detailed in part some of the hardships of our Cornish mining forebears.

And it was also a week in which I’d dealt with more modern industries, those surrounding the buying and selling of a house, including modern hate figures like bankers and solicitors.

It’s interesting to reflect that even they – and journalists – don’t approach the levels of opprobrium levelled at miners ever since the Armageddon of the miners’ strike in 1984-5, the high-water mark of their depiction as the great Satan of the evil union movement, led by old Beelzebub himself, Arthur Scargill. To many, Margaret Thatcher’s finest achievement remains her “victory” over the miners in 1983.

I never thought it a victory. Four lost Welshmen and their poor families reminded us this week what a terribly dangerous calling is mining. I’ve known enough friends who’ve described loved ones’ last days, hacking up blood and soot from their scarred lungs, in great pain. I’ve been down dark holes in the ground. I know that 100 years ago boys were sent down into the dark. Perhaps they cried for their mothers as they went. I knew a miner in his 60s who cried for his mother in his last illness.

I know that I would never have stood hour after hour in the fever heat and the ghastly light, hacking, hacking, hacking and heaving, soot in every sweating pore of my body, the knowledge of the frailty of my link to the world of light nagging always at the back of my mind.

In fact, I believed in 1984-5 and believe now that any of us who use power and light for our comfort should observe a national day of gratitude to, and celebration of, the people who provide it for us. Certainly I’d rather be paying decent money to miners than I would to the sort of people who, in the words of Brother Hazzard’s Go North, “take the appetite from life”, the sort of people who can’t even be bothered to return a phone call.

But disdain for miners and trade unions runs very deep in this country. The BBC’s Political Editor Nick Robinson recently covered the mounting campaign for fresh public sector strikes in support of workers’ pension rights and said “the public” wouldn’t stand for more action.

Are the people voting for strike action not members of the public, then? I presume he means, by “public”, those who use public sector services. But doesn’t everybody use public sector services – even trade union members?

People don’t seem to have the power of thought. Last week, I met a chap who told me how difficult his job had become, saying it was common to have to work until 8 or 9 at night. Not enough staff, too many demands, no defence. A few brief moments later he told me how much he admired Margaret Thatcher for standing up to the trade unions.

As I believe the young people say, with feeling: duh-uh…

Heat and dust

Then I read Simon Parker’s haunting new novella Solid (Scryfa, £5). Well. I spent an evening in the heat and dust of Spain, the world of Edward Jose: Cornish miner turned Spanish bullfighter, lover, father, soldier, hymned by Lorca, known to Picasso, ‘El Optimista’ was a man with a massive appetite for life.

Is “real wisdom … in letting another man waste his own breath trying to persuade you to adopt a viewpoint which you know he cannot alter”?; I don’t know. I do know that I loved Solid’s magical realism and elegiac beauty. Small but perfectly formed, and with a credo of real power: life is for living. Oh, it cheered me – and moved me too.

You can buy it now, if you’ve any sense, on www.scryfa.co.uk – follow the link on the left and go to ‘Other titles’, or send £5 to Scryfa, Halwinnick Cottage, Linkinhorne, Callington, Cornwall PL17 7NS.

A senior moment

I know many of you, brothers and sisters, are Of A Certain Age. This week, I joined you.

On Sunday I repaired to the bathroom clutching my hair trimmer, in order to give myself a haircut. I long ago ceased going to the barber, you see, instead doing my own hair and muttering all the while inane comments to myself about holidays, soccer and foreigners.

(Incidentally, as the father of two small children and the partner of a full-time teacher, I know there’s no point whatsoever in discussing anything for this or any other weekend).

For those among you to whom hair trimmers remain a mystery, what happens is this: you grasp your implement and attach over the sharp metal teeth the plastic head of your choice, this head being what determines the length of the wreckage you are about to leave clinging to your head. I use a 3mm, or “number one”, attachment, preferring very short hair as an approach to my male pattern baldness.

This Sunday I wondered why my trimmer felt harsher than usual, and why there was so much hair flying through the air. Half-way through, the answer occurred: I’d forgotten to attach the plastic head to the trimmer, and was merrily shaving my scalp to a rough, blood-pitted stubble. Having got half-way, I had no choice but to continue. I ended up looking like a badger with the mange.

Some of you may have a few years on me, but how many of you can beat that for a senior moment?

On and on and on

Thanks for asking: The house selling and buying saga goes on, and I shall report back in full if ever we manage to haul ourselves across the finishing line. For the time being, a question: of 27 recipients of calls from me who said “I’ll get back to you,” guess how many actually returned the call?

Two.