At first light, Newlyn and its inhabitants seems not a million miles away from the fictitious port captured so vividly by Dylan Thomas in Under Milk Wood...
"To begin at the beginning:
It is a Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and- rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.
Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrogered sea. And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wet-nosed yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.
You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing."
without trying too hard many could identify similar characters in the local community, as no doubt any small port the world over could...
for now the boxes are five...
or six high...
keeping the auctioneers and buyers on their toes...
as they place their bids on fish like these line caught pollack...
huge ray...
brilliant brill which may well be on a Jonathon Norris wet fish counter near you in Pimlico, Hackney or Tufnell Park - but you'll have to be early as this prime example of a Cornish flatfish will be snapped up quick enough...
along with a few witches...
the big beamer, St Georges landed a whack of rays...
there's two sides to every story...
taking it all in his stride, auctioneer Ryan holds forth...
selling three trips of net fish...
there's a big difference between red and grey gurnards...
ray have two slits cut in them to facilitate easy draining from the gut cavity while the fish are stored in the fishroom at sea...
specimen monk tails...
and hake from the Govenek...
for some buyers the lure of quality fish was just too great and they bought most of the boxes...
BBC TV programme maker Sam wowed by the quantity of quality fish on this morning's #FishyFriday market...
which included this stunning turbot...
and a box containing what few have ever see, even fewer could identify and even fewer can say they have ever eaten...
as opposed to the instantly recognisable but in very short supply mackerel...
the happy hake...
from the Ajax...
with three offshore netters, four beam trawlers and a handful of inshore boats landed overnight the market was end-to-end fish this morning...
with trips stacked up to nine high to save market floor space...
with the cuttlefish season over for the beam trawlers they have now turned their attention to fishing the deeper waters for Dover and megrim sole, monk and other high value flats...
while the larger grades of whitefish are dragged off the market floor.
