THE PROPER JOB OGGY

ARCHIVE RECORD: KERN-034 // THE PROPER JOB OGGY

Recovered from the entirely fictional Kernow Records archive, The Proper Job Oggy presents The Boscastle Four in full village-fête novelty form: washboard bounce, fiddle scrape, acoustic strum, and the sort of culinary certainty that can divide counties faster than any council boundary.

This is not part of the principal folklore cycle of saints, dragons, ghosts, and drowned kingdoms. It belongs to the smaller, sillier shelf beside it: Cornish dialect, village food arguments, comic regional pride, exaggerated sleeve notes, and the kind of 45 R.P.M. single that might plausibly have turned up in a dusty box marked MONO — PLAY LOUD, BUT NOT WHILE EATING.

Side A is a cheerful defence of the Cornish pasty: side-crimped, properly filled, peppered, steaming, and best regarded as both meal and minor engineering triumph. It nods to tinners, travelling workers, mid-morning croust, Bucca's share, and the old story of the two-course pasty with savoury at one end and sweet at the other.

Side B moves from dinner to tea-table law. Jam goes first. Cream goes on top. Anything else is treated as a constitutional crisis with crumbs. The song also plays with the old skohn/skon pronunciation argument, here turned into a silly linguistic rule: on the plate it is stately, elegant, and intact; once eaten, it is skon, gone, and no longer available for evidence.

FIELD NOTES:

The Proper Job Oggy: A jaunty Cornish pasty song built around side-crimping, tiddy, skirt, pepper, mid-morning croust, tinners' lore, Bucca's corner, and the firm rejection of that top-crimped nonsense from over the river.

The Law of the Scone: A comic cream-tea argument in musical form: jam on the bottom, cream on the top, Devonshire heresy kept at arm's length, and a running joke in which a skohn becomes skon the instant it disappears into someone's face.

THE DIALECT AND LOCAL WORDS USED

Oggy: A pasty; here treated with the level of respect normally reserved for civic monuments, ancient stones, and very reliable kettles.

Proper Job: An expression of approval, satisfaction, or general excellence; useful when the thing in question has been done right, eaten hot, or crimped on the correct side.

'Ansome: Handsome, fine, splendid, or generally pleasing; a word large enough to cover a well-made pasty and, on a forgiving day, a decent cup of tea.

Tummals: A great heap or large quantity, especially of food. In this case, plenty of skirt, tiddy, spice, and good honest filling.

Skirt: Beef skirt, traditionally prized for pasty filling; not a garment in this context, though the confusion would make a terrible sandwich.

Tiddy: Potato; one of the essential foundations of a proper pasty filling.

Crimp: The folded, sealed edge of the pasty. In this record, side-crimping is presented less as a technique and more as a moral position.

Bucca: A figure from Cornish folklore. The lyric gives Bucca the last corner of the pasty, which is probably wise. Some beings are best kept politely fed.

Croust: A mid-morning snack or meal break; not quite breakfast, not quite dinner, but very much the right moment for something wrapped in paper and twine.

Skohn / Skon: Used here for the B-side's pronunciation joke: a scone on the plate is a skohn; once eaten, it is skon. This is not a formal linguistic ruling, merely the sort of argument that keeps tea rooms spiritually alive.

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OGGY, CROUST, AND PROPER JOB
A Kernow Records curiosity in glorious monophonic village-fête form.