N.R. Phillips (Photo by    Tom Tregenza)

Last summer I met Cornish author N.R. Phillips while I was speaking about The Miner & the Viscount at the Penzance Literary Festival in Cornwall. We chatted a while and he kindly gave me an autographed copy of his book Rainbows in the Spray. Since then we have corresponded and Roy has given me permission to share some of his delightful stories and poems with you.

To introduce you to this entertaining writer, here is his hilarious dialect story Coleus.

Do you keep house plants? This is about an indoor gardener whose enthusiasm got away from her!

Coleus

Cresmass comes but once a year. The trouble is, the way they’re going, they’ll soon last ’leven months. They’ll have us hangin’ up our stockin’s on Good Fridays d’reckly. Mark my words, we shain’t know whether they’re full of chocolate eggs or shiny balls. Mind you, it d’ take that long to decide what present to buy some for people. And the closer you are to people, the more difficult it is. Somebody up country, they that you hardly ever see, you can send them a voucher for a book, or something to heave in the bath, or smother on their chacks, and that’s that.

The Cresmass before last, I honestly did not know what to get her. . . Some have green fingers, what they d’ call, and some don’t, and I’d never gov her a plant before. It might have meant the end of a beautiful relationship, like they d’ say. Well, I tell ‘ee what… she was delighted. Said she’d never seen anything like it in her life. Over the moon, she was. We put ‘n in the kitchen winda and it was like a thing grawed there. 

Read the rest of the story here.