I’m not sure if the bloke in the stovepipe hat above was representing the Engineering Section of the Cider Club as Brunel, but as you can see, Littleton people – and lots from elsewhere – went the extra mile on Saturday night and turned up in proper mummers’ costume and makeup. It can be extremely cold in late January but if there’s a clear sky we often enjoy a perfect moonrise over the orchard just as the volley of blank, black powder shots are fired of to scare the demons away. Sparks and flames light the sky and we all get going on the saucepans and empty barrels while cheering lustily, fuelled by a variety of ciders. Lifesaver – the original cider – comes in at a modest 4% but there’s also Lifetaker which – our son reliably told us – is nearer 10%. I used to love cider but as I’ve got older it seems to have taken against me and in any case I’m usually driving so I have a perfect excuse not to make myself ill. Someone there liked it so much they’ve even had themselves tattooed.
Of course these ancient celebrations of the New Year – Plough Monday is another example – feel a bit pagan. My attitude to them is a bit too open minded for some. I’ve always thought of paganism as a sort of “open all hours” spirituality, a bit like a left luggage office where you can look for something that’s missing even if you don’t quite know what it is. The word pagan is bandied about so sloppily, often as a religious insult, that it resists all definition. For me, the Earth and her courses could never be appropriated into any spiritual systematics because we barely understand them, and so we just need to express our gratitude and joy at these times of turning. I’m there because I used to be the Vicar, and I can be relied on to bless the trees in as amusing a manner as possible and in less than 100 words.
The funniest part of the ceremony was the point at which a slice of bread soaked in cider is hung on the branches. The Green Man attempted a sub scientific explanation which had the insects which would otherwise have munched on the shoots and buds attracted away by the smell of cider. I prefer to think that the smoke from the bonfire would have been a more efficient deterrent. Anyway, someone asked a young boy – about seven years old I should guess – if he would hang the slice of bread on the tree. He demanded with a completely straight face – “Is it gluten free?“. So bread hung up and a glass of Lifesaver poured around the roots, a poem read by the Green Man, shotguns fired, pans beaten and a blessing from me and we all followed the King and the Queen back to the marquee in her ceremonial chariot.
As we walked down the avenue marked by lanterns I fell into conversation with a farmer I’d known for thirty years and whom I’d confirmed, married and whose children I’d Christened. I may well have also Christened him since I knew his parents well. He gave up an afternoon a few years ago to show a group of us his new robotic milking parlour. I thought I’d hate it, but it was evident that the cows who got their udders cleaned and backs scratched on their way through liked it so much they would try to go back around for a second feed – prevented by the software. Anyway we talked about regenerative farming and about his small wind farm – fiercely contested at the time, and the fact that he powers the whole milking operation from solar panels and sells raw milk from a vending machine in the yard. We talked about no-till and regenerative farming and soil improvements, not least how long they take to show results, and I felt I was talking to someone we should applaud as a farmer rather than offer knee jerk antagonism; lumping all dairy farming into an undifferentiated mass of baddies.
Later we bumped into a nursery nurse who’d looked after our youngest when he was a baby and she threw her arms around him and gave him a big hug. I think he was totally taken aback at being remembered at all, and touched by how much she’d cared about him. I was able to tell him that I’d had to fetch him home from Nursery once after they’d fed him “mud” aka mushrooms!
There was an excellent folk band, joined by a ukulele group and we sang a couple of wassail songs including the Gloucestershire Wassail and then they all went off on more well known songs. During the evening we discovered that an elderly parishioner had died during the night and there was palpable sadness at the news.
I remember Margaret Thatcher claiming that there’s no such thing as community. What a deluded thing to say! She’d obviously never known what it is to experience good neighbours; a shared culture; a village; a history and the mutuality that thrives on shared experience.
Wassail, wassail all over the town!
The first verse of the Gloucestershire Wassail traditional carol sung on Epiphany Eve
Our toast it is white and our ale it is brown;
Our bowl it is made of the white maple tree;
With the wassailing-bowl we’ll drink to thee!
Postscript
I spent most of Friday writing another long piece, but I couldn’t make it work. It just felt bad tempered, incoherent and plain wrong. I know myself well enough to be sure that I’d have kept on fiddling with it and press the publish button with the faintly guilty feeling that I’d let myself down. Anyway in a rather Jungian moment, I somehow managed to press select all and delete; throwing away hours of work. After a few fiery moments as I hunted desperately for my deleted words I realized that my inattention and a fat thumb had done unconsciously what my unconscious was demanding, and I felt completely peaceful about it. I still don’t know how I did it, but thanks anyway to my inner critic. As someone (much disputed) once wrote, you need to learn to “kill your darlings!” It’s not unusual for me to incorporate twenty or thirty edits in a piece, but I’ve never ditched the lot before. Lesson learned.
We did however find a nice clump of Rock Samphire down near a little cove where we watched a female seal playing with her cub for about half an hour – close inshore – it was enchanting. We also put up a snipe who waited until we were almost upon it before it shot into the air like a clay from a trap. All the usual cast of gulls, shags, crows, jackdaws and chough were either sitting on rocks looking out across the slate grey Irish Sea, sporting ecstatically in the updraught from the cliff or congregating noisily in the fields behind. A tough looking ram sporting a fetching harness of blue raddle had been about his tupping with enthusiasm if the sheeps’ behinds were anything to go by, but he was taking a break and grazing contentedly with the others. We found a solitary field mushroom whose neighbours had been trodden into the grass, and when we were thoroughly cold we walked back.
Pig’s Snout is a very oddly shaped apple, rather square shouldered and once seen .. etc. Sadly there was no example of the Goose Arse available for inspection at Plas yn Rhiw, but I imagine there must be some resemblance shared by the Medlar – also known as Dog’s Arse by vulgar people like me.