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.
Historically there was little work done on the land around Christmas but there was always hedge laying, which was one of my favourite jobs when I was a groundsman. So with a pause, let’s say, between the solstice and Epiphany on January 6th, work in the fields could resume. We used to celebrate Plough Monday in one of my parishes – always the first Monday after 6th January, and the Young Farmers would carry an old Ransomes plough into the church, along with some hand tools and lanterns and I would bless it before it was returned once again to a gloomy corner in someone’s barn. The plough was slightly too long to manoeuvre down the aisle of the church so the handles were reduced in size and welded back on again, probably making it the shortest Ransomes plough in the country.
At last the email from Mike arrived today inviting me to take part in the Wassail in early January. He’s not often as late as this and I was beginning to worry that something had gone wrong – or perhaps the Cider Club was blaming me for the poor season this year. I’m perfectly prepared to accept that my official blessings may not have the same efficiency now I’m no longer on the payroll as it were, but in truth I think it was ‘the Beast from the East’ that did the damage. Wassailing, if you didn’t know, is an ancient (well – medieval) tradition of blessing the apple trees and driving out the demons to ensure a good crop in the following season. I was the parish priest of Littleton on Severn for a decade and so it fell to me to bless both cider apple trees and ploughs in my parishes as part of the old New Year traditions. But our connection to the orchard goes back far beyond that because Madame worked as assistant to the trials Officer at Long Ashton Research Station in the early 70’s and she was responsible for producing the budwood for the orchard that subsequently became the home of the Littleton Cider Club. Who could resist the lore and language of cider with varieties like “Slack ma girdle” and ‘Goose arse’ Here’s my journal entry for last year:
So that invitation to one of my favourite places and events cast a cheerful air on the rest of the day and later we grabbed the dry weather with both hands and went up to the allotment to carry on building the raised beds. My earlier (and gloomy) ruminations on the quantity of topsoil we’d need to find have been mitigated by the way we’re constructing the beds. 
I’ve written earlier about the problem of waterlogging, so we’ve been constructing the paths between the bed as dual purpose soakaways and paths. In practice that means a good deal of hauling up and back to the woodchip pile. We’ve seen it suggested that woodchip robs the soil of nitrogen, and that would certainly be true if we just dug it into the beds, but used as a path material it supresses weeds, makes a comfortable all-weather path and also seems to rot down quite quickly, needing replenishing from time to time. We’ve not found any depletion of the soil in the beds at all, and we hope that these large reservoirs of composted material will add to the general condition of the plot in the long term. I fix the bed edging boards in place first, and when they’re secure I dig out the path to about 18″ deep by just over a foot wide and throw that soil up on to the bed. It doesn’t do the job entirely, but it adds around 20 cubic feet of soil to each bed. With compost added as well, the beds are raised by another four inches – all adding to the depth. The photo is of two beds we constructed on the same principles earlier in the year.