Porthmeor Beach is a vast sweep of golden sand, tucked beneath the Tate and edged by sloping Cornish cliffs.

One weekday last August, I perched there with a cold kombucha and a pot of olives, mesmerised as the sea glowed a vivid turquoise in the sun.

I’d just dropped my seven-year-old daughter, Mabel, at the nearby St Ives School of Painting – where she was spending the afternoon channeling her inner Barbara Hepworth – leaving me with a few precious hours to myself in one of Britain’s most Instagrammed corners.

It was every inch the coastal dream, the picture-postcard fantasy I’d imagined when I left the South East on the eve of the first Covid lockdownconvinced that a new life by the sea would be all clifftop walks and afternoon teas.

But in truth, I moved here, made every mistake going and discovered that Cornwall isn’t the downtrodden sob story nor the romantic idyll The Guardian makes it out to be. The reality is much less whimsical and full of contradictions.

Instead of Newlyn artists and starving fishermen, real Cornish life involves navigating a perilous mix of bin wars, vicious seagulls and quaint cottages teetering above mine shafts.

And while I’d love to tell you that I’ve blended seamlessly into this picturesque yet prickly landscape, it’s actually been a steep learning curve, where I’ve managed to offend the entire village, racked up thousands in surveyors’ fees and endured more unsolicited opinions than I knew existed, from my bins to my non-existent love life.

Our first attempt at buying in St Agnes was a Grade II listed, 18th-century cottage, but the sale collapsed spectacularly when the owner, a musician in his fifties, casually forgot to mention the small matter of mining restrictions.

The place, it turned out, was unmortgageable.

‘I assumed you rich Londoners would be mortgage-free by now,’ he huffed, conveniently overlooking not only our bank balance but the fact that a 300-foot mineshaft threatening to open up beneath the bedroom wasn’t exactly a selling point.

This conversation exchange should’ve been my first clue. Most of Cornwall clings to the belief that their lives are uniquely harder than everyone else’s.

It’s a mindset that goes right back to Methodism, when John Wesley won over the tin miners and farmers by convincing them they were downtrodden by their Westminster overlords.

But these days it just means that anyone from outside Cornwall is automatically seen as rich and therefore fair game as a cash cow.

Our next attempt to buy in the village was thwarted when the surveyor discovered that the bungalow had been built with deteriorating mundic blocks, made of waste rock from mining and quarrying and beach gravel. It’s another little-known Cornish curse that makes properties unmortgageable.

We took the hint from the universe and bought a ‘project’ on the opposite coast, in a quaint village at the edge of the Roseland Peninsula.

But alas, the pressure of living in a wreck with a newborn baby in the middle of nowhere all got too much. Our relationship finally gave way under the pressure.

As a single woman in a rural village, I might as well be a witch. Every move is treated as suspicious, and the wives eye me up like I’m planning to run off with their farmer husbands, mud-caked Hunter wellies and all.

The rest of the village, meanwhile, watches me on bin day. It turns out Cornwall’s biggest obsession isn’t clotted cream, second homes or tourists. It’s actually taking out the rubbish.

I once had a neighbour furiously hammering on my door, at 6am, because seagulls had pecked open my bin bags, casting hummus pots, avocado skins and Oatly cartons across the road.

‘Everyone knows that the rubbish should be placed in seagull-proof sacks,’ she ranted.

Most of the street had weighed in by 8am, demanding to know why I hadn’t cleared it up sooner. The shame.

I wasn’t about to abandon a sleeping baby just so a few bits of rubbish could be saved from the clutches of the swooping seagulls.

Bins are actually taken so seriously that Reform won the recent Cornwall Council elections by campaigning on this topic alone. There wasn’t a whisper of immigration or crime.

And given my track record with seagull-shredded rubbish, I can’t help feeling partly responsible for this victory.

I do, however, still resent the neighbours’ complaints about my lack of haste when Cornish businesses proudly move at a snail’s pace. They even have a special word for it: ‘dreckley’.

It’s supposed to mean ‘later’, but it actually means ‘when we can be bothered’. It’s hardly surprising in a place that’s been awash with EU funding for decades, basically Universal Credit for businesses.

I’m not the only one who’s struggled.

A tabloid photographer once confessed, on a shoot, that he’d tried living in a neighbouring village but found it a rather strange place. The trick, he said, was to rent in a few spots before settling, because some of Cornwall’s rural hubs can be hostile to incomers.

And a fellow vegan mum told me that she’d been unceremoniously booted out of her own village Facebook group after a dairy farmer took offence at her PETA campaigning.

But I dare not complain. Outsiders aren’t allowed to, as I learned when I asked the village Facebook group who was blaring out-of-tune Bon Jovi hits at midnight a couple of summers ago.

I thought it was a harmless post, yet I discovered, too late, that I’d insulted a so-called ‘sacred’ local tradition. It was an annual booze-up in a field known grandly as ‘the Shindig’.

The backlash was instant, with dozens of furious locals piling on, fuming that I hadn’t embraced the midnight Rattler-fuelled revelry.

Men I’d never laid eyes on informed me that if I wanted to ‘settle properly’ in Cornwall, I should stop complaining, drag my toddler into a field at midnight and learn to ‘have fun.’

One bloke even suggested that if I did, I might ‘find a man’ and wouldn’t be bitter and single.

I’d only been curious about where the noise came from, as we’re surrounded by fields, after all.

By the time I logged on the next morning, the post had exploded with over 200 angry comments. It was obvious people had Googled me overnight too.

My notifications were filled with total strangers offering unsolicited advice on everything from my physical appearance to my career, as though a Facebook post about noisy music somehow made my entire life fair game.

I was still traumatised from bin-gate and the Shindig when I discovered parking is just as controversial. A police officer awkwardly knocked on my door after an elderly neighbour complained that I’d parked on the road outside my own house so I could get the pushchair out of the car.

In doing so, I had apparently spoiled his rural view. I was astonished when the officer suggested I move it ‘in the interest of neighbourly relations’.

Apparently the police have nothing better to do down here than referee village squabbles.

I’m still learning from my many mistakes and, knowing my track record, I’ll be making them for years to come.

On that one August day at Porthmeor, I had discovered that both the seagulls and Cornwall Council’s traffic wardens are actually more vicious than the local county lines dealers.

A seagull pecked a hole straight through my cherished Longchamp Le Pliage to get to a brownie. But small mercies, I suppose, at least nobody in St Ives shouted at me about the mess.

And I returned to the car to learn I’d been fined for parking on a double yellow line that was completely hidden by an overgrown hedge. Even with photo evidence, the council still made me cough up.

The real money-makers in St Ives are the council parking wardens. They slapped an entire row of unsuspecting tourists with tickets that day.

Everyone from England is rich, after all.

I might hate my village, but I love St Ives. Its mazelike alleys, tiny cottages and bustling harbour make living in Cornwall so much more tolerable.

And I can’t see myself moving away again anytime soon.

These days, when someone new moves in, I find myself checking their bins like the rest of the village. God help me, I’ve become one of them.