What a Carry On

Midsummers is a bit confusing.

It can fall anywhere between the 21st and 24th of June in the Northern Hemisphere and is a time of Pagan and ancient rituals but of startlingly different significance and emphasis in participating nations.

The Scandinavians place great importance on the period and it is a time of feasts, bonfires, singing and dancing in joyous abandonment. It is celebrated in the true spirit of the emergence of mankind from fear, superstition, respect and awe of all things natural and real.

In the UK it is marked with some stock TV coverage of the Summer Solstice with a few druidic followers, white witches and warlocks clutching their robes as they scale rusty barbed wire obstacles to be able to say that they touched some prehistoric monument or standing stones and communed with Mother Earth. Managed Open Access through English Heritage does tend to take the edge off proceedings somewhat. 

I do associate this particular time of the year with Village Fetes, School Fundraising Donkey Derby races and Garden Party's which could be construed as the modern, gentrified, inoffensive and mainly sensibly and appropriately dressed multi-faith equivalent but without even a Maypole in plain sight or a large wicker man in full combustion.

I would have expected the populist resurgence in New Age beliefs to take hold and run with the old practices but in my travels I have seen neither publicity for nor participation in such things, certainly not within normal hours.

The recent Folk Festival in a nearby town was probably the closest to the ancient rituals allowable by the Council and meeting compliance with Health and Safety.

The sight of a pack of off-duty Mummers and Morris Dancers seeking out draught scrumpy under restricted licensing hours can be simultaneously a humourous but also a surreal and scary experience. At least Somerfield have a good off licence section to cater for all primitive thirsts.

There is a very strange incongruity about sitting on bus opposite a splendidly fully regailed Crow-Man trying not to make eye contact as this would only lead to a conversation and shatter the whole illusion. I would prefer not to know that the raw earthiness of his character is so different from his day job in Customer Sales for a large electrical retailer.

We stay silent in each others company save for the faint swish, swish of black feathers which float serenely to the metal single level access floor of the bus as he alights at the top of a featureless suburban housing estate. I glance back under a brief and fleeting intriguing afterthought only to see a large black Raven sat astride a pile of hastily strewn garments on the public pavement.