Drang

I have been absent from internet access in the sun-lavished (other than a rainy Tuesday morning) county of Cornwall. As ever my eye was on the search for things beginning with the fourth letter in the alphabet. Penning a poem about a crab fell one letter short, cycling leisurely along the coast from fishy Padstow to stony Wadebridge didn't supply me with material either, but then a sign caught my attention and I made our traveling party pause while I pointed my mobile phone camera in its direction to capture it: the sign, mounted twenty foot up in the air in simple black capitalised text, read 'DRANG'. 

  An initial internet search didn't seem to yield any answers. A German literary movement throwing off the constraints of rationalism didn't quite fit with the lively and increasingly commercialised Padstow. It also seemed unlikely that the sign was commemorating the first major battle between the Americans and the Vietnamese in 1965. It was not until I researched Cornish slang that I found that this sign simply means alleyway. If I had known I would have wandered down a drang and relayed to you an authentic drang experience. I could have even returned late at night and considered how drangs compare with more traditional alleyways as haunting locations for stories. In the absence of drang experience though, I shall conclude with attempting to communicate a small part of my holiday in the Cornish dialect:

  I paused in my reading of Wuthering Heights to chomp through to the nub. Helen wandered out to watch the dimixey, but Will (Helen's brother) had a touch of the tictolaroo and some thought (no one did really) that he had swallowed a paddypaws. He hadn't.