Last night I dreamt I went to Padstow again . . . and it was a nightmare.

When we went, in August a few years ago, every other tourist in the whole of the southwest was there too, in search of seafood.

We crawled along in nose-to-tail traffic, couldn’t find anywhere to park, queued half an hour for pasties, then left, feeling hot, sweaty, and pretty silly in our Quiksilver Hawaiian print boardshorts, I can tell you.

So I have some sympathy for the Cornish terrorists who’ve just threatened to firebomb the premises of Rick Stein – whose successful restaurants have put the coastal town on the map – with the incendiary expertise of a former member of the Free Wales Army who, they boasted, was a dab hand at setting holiday homes owned by the English ablaze.

Padstow is, even compared to other seaside resorts at the height of the holiday season, peculiarly horrid, and presumably, since the arrival of Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen at Cornwall’s Watergate Bay – another “imperialist English location” apparently – traffic and tourists and prices and prolific pasty-consumption have all increased still further.

Anyway, in its murderous e-mail, the nice-sounding Cornwall National Liberation Army described Oliver as “another incomer who has caused inflation of house and other living costs at Cornish expense and subsidised by European funding”.

And what was the response to all this? The police are looking into the threats, but what the Cornwall county council leader, David Whalley, said was: “I understand there may be frustrations about not being able to get affordable housing, but this is not the best way to achieve it.”

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the first thing that Whalley pinpoints is not the fact that Rick Stein prices a starter of St Enodoc asparagus at a tenner, but the lack of housing.

In 53 key rural areas housing is now so expensive that properties are fetching 14 times the average local salary (the average house price equates to 7.4 times income nationally). In the southwest and Norfolk in particular, according to last week’s report from the Commission for Rural Communities, properties are completely out of reach of locals, which means that agriculture and horticulture have to use migrant labour, young people are leaving, schools and shops are closing.

So the Cornish terrorists (just typing that seems wrong – I want to put in clotted cream or crab straight after the word Cornish) aren’t really cross that Rick and Jamie, two of our cuddliest chefs, have made huge successes in the county, where there are 13,458 second homes or 5.6% of the housing stock.

Like everyone else in the land who wants a house and hasn’t got one, or can’t find one, they’re really cross about the shortage of affordable housing, which I don’t think is entirely the fault of those two celebrity chefs, irritating though the pair’s success might be.

They’ve picked the wrong target. The Cornish cell should have sent its nasty e-mail to the Treasury politicians who have made life so jolly cushy for the new class of super-rich, who work in the City but save a fortune by claiming nonUK domiciled tax status, and who are soaking up their bonuses and profits and excess income with as much property as they can, in town and country, sight unseen. The new “superclass” have elbowed out locals who can no longer buy houses where they were brought up and consider home.

“Of our client list wanting to buy country property, up to half are looking for second or third homes plus,” says Ed Sugden, of the buying agents Property Vision. “And yes, we do have a fair number of nondomiciled residents among them.”

What this means, as the Cornish Liberation Front, or whatever they’re called, pointed out already, is that huge sums of money are being made here but not actually paid back to this country in the form of tax, which means that the poor locals, not the filthy rich, end up paying for the schools, and hospitals, and parks, and sewage treatment plants, and the roads and the motorways the new superclass need to drive on in their Porsche Cayennes to access their third homes in prime rural locations, if they ever visit them, that is.

If I were Gordon Brown, or Ed Balls, I’d be worried about this.

I predict a riot, and not just in Padstein.

- Last Sunday morning, as my husband slumbered, I raced downstairs, cut up cantaloupe melon and strawberries, found the children’s homemade cards and mine (from Paperchase’s charming deadbeat dad range, depicting unshaven man with a paunch and wifebeater vest turning shiny, sweating bangers on a barbie). Then, while the kettle boiled, I clipped yellow roses from the garden for a jug, and staggered up to the bedroom with a tray.

“Happy Father’s Day, darling,” I said, dumping the papers on his lap so he could have his breakfast in bed with the Sundays.

My husband appeared very pleased with this gold-plated service, and I heaved a sigh of relief, thinking that was over for another 364 days, at any rate.

Later that day I found him staring at a Jaguar ad in the Magazine which said, “This Father’s Day, June 17th . . .” and a picture of a slinky-nosed, throaty, silver sports car with a thoughtful expression, and still, the penny didn’t drop.

When it did, though, he still demanded a double tribute this year, despite his loathing of the sickly Hallmark culture and carnival of spending that all these anniversaries demand.

“We all spend so much time wallowing over the sheer marvellousness of mothers that I am prepared to make an exception and receive a card on Father’s Day,” he graciously allowed, “so long as its unaccompanied by any pointless present. If you really want to give fathers the sort of present they like,” he went on, as I started wondering whether I’d have to nip out for a nose-hair trimmer, an electric carving knife or a furry cover for his Big Bertha, “It would be for their wives and daughters to stop spending, if only for one Sunday each year.”

So this is for my father as well as my husband, and any fathers and husbands who are reading this.

We do love and appreciate you, even if we never say so, and even if we do buy our stuff with your money.

Happy Father’s Day, chaps.

rachel.johnson@sunday-times.co.uk

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