"Odd place at times, Sennen Cove," says Andrew Carne – and he should know because he has been keeping a shop there for several years.

To prove just how odd it can be, during the past year he kept a diary, one seen at first on the Internet and, with the help of his parents, wife, sister and publisher, he has now collected and corrected all 365 entries in book form.

Bearing in mind something his mother has said, enjoyment for the reader must be doubtful.

"I always said he'd come to nothing and now I've read the diary I know I was right," she said.

In common with the majority of the diary entries, this maternal comment has been made with tongue firmly in cheek because this is, above all else, a comic take on life in a Cornish cove.

By way of an introduction, the author writes: "Spurning school at the age of 11, he spent his formative years down the mines until, at the age of 16, he worked out where the exit was. Moving to west London he discovered there were worse ways of earning a living and spent 25 years doing one of them, doing stuff with computers and the people that own a lot of them. As if that wasn't punishment enough, he bought a shop in West Cornwall where he continues to live and occasionally work."

Believe what you will of all that, while his daily contacts with the great British public and those from elsewhere, the Cornish weather, and his much-maligned dog Bo, are very amusing, it is not all fun and games. Indeed, he is perhaps at his best when speaking with his tongue removed from his cheek. His description of a journey made "below grass" for instance, is most telling. He put in the winning bid at a local charity auction for "a trip down a tin mine" and his account of that very damp and dangerous visit pays tribute to the miners of the past and to the members of today's Geevor Trust who work hard keeping the mine alive.

Shortly afterwards, when still feeling the aches and pains of tunnelling underground and realising what Cornwall was once all about, he went to St Ives – and he pulls no punches in voicing his opinion of what the town, and much of Cornwall, has become.

When not keeping shop or walking his dog, Andrew Carne is closely associated with Sennen lifeboat and other village matters.

And while his customers have been warned that no one is safe from his dry observations and that if they are "not utterly offended by the end of the book then they must have missed a bit", he is pretty witty.

An all-Cornish production, published and printed by Palores of Redruth at £8.99, The Cove Diary Ramblings Of A West Cornwall Shopkeeper And His Dog by Andrew Carne is available at The Old Boathouse in Sennen Cove and at St Buryan post office.