Temporal dysphoria

I was at Ludlow Castle in Shropshire this weekend, donning the codpiece and giving it some hey nonny no at their Medieval Fayre. We were spared last year's sub-zero temperatures though there was a bitter wind blowing through my liripipe.


It was while warming ourselves in the green room that conversation turned to the role of bagpipers in history.


It seems that right up until the Early Modern period, every village would hold regular Church Ales, big communal piss ups with all money raised going to help the local poor. Entertainment was, naturally, provided by pipers who, unlike most people, had free license to travel beyond the parish boundaries. There was, in other words, a good living to be made as a bagpiper - their services were in demand, even if they were often disreputable folk.

And in that moment, I had it. I put a name to a feeling I've had all my life, the feeling of being born in the wrong era. We're familiar with gender dysphoria, being born in the wrong body. Perhaps we could talk about temporal dysphoria too?


Freudians would no doubt remind me that life was pretty grim back then and say it's all projection, wish-fulfilment, a neurotic's fantasy.


Jungians would view things more positively and suggest that I need to integrate the archetypal force bubbling up from my unconscious. For medieval minstrel, read trickster. Let him in or find he'll trip you up.


But parsimony has led me to conclude that the transmigration of souls is really the only viable explanation.


When first I picked up a set of pipes I didn't do it because I wanted to be a medieval minstrel. No, I did it because I already knew that's what I was. It's taken twenty years to get over the shock of finding that the world thinks otherwise.

Veni, vidi, Wodi

We played our first proper Fez Noz with Wod on Saturday, in the delightful venue of North Wootton village hall down in Somerset, a stone's throw from the Glastonbury festival site. (Many thanks to Sonny for organizing it and playing an exquisite set, Ruth and Kalindi for feeding us with fine curry, Rob for providing lamps and greenery, and Mike and Jane for putting us up afterwards.)


It's always a bit nerve-wracking unleashing a new project: will people come? will they like our tunes? will our tunes work for the dances? and so on and so forth. We needn't have worried, for not long into the first set things started cooking, with whoops of delight from a crowded dance floor.


I suppose our approach to the music is quite uncompromising, in that we think we're there to serve the dance not the dancers. That means we play tunes for a long time (one or two weary looks from the floor suggested not everyone is with us on this). I'm told our Rond de St Vincent went on for nearly 25 minutes. That's one three part tune played over and over for a repetitive stepping dance.


You can feel when the dancers begin to tire - the whole thing begins to wobble a bit - but if you carry on and keep pushing something rather wonderful happens. New energy bubbles up. The dance begins to carry the dancers. They swing with more vigour. Their steps are lighter. The ground loosens its grip.


In rehearsals we jokingly say 'Ah, the Wod was with us' when it's gone well, as if the Wod were some horned thing from ancient times, all bushes and briars and made of hedge. But there's a truth behind the jest. As in Irish mythology, where the heroes of old would start to shudder and shake into warp-spasm before battle, so, when the Wod comes, things get blurry round the edges. We start to play riffs and rivulets we could not imagine. As Jim puts it, we break through the meniscus.


We ended the set with a suite of Hanter Dros played acoustically on the floor. A tight huddle of dancers circled round us, dodging drones and Jane's bow to push us, it, to an exquisite level of intensity. An extraordinary night.

New Telling the Bees EPK

The extraordinary Mr Bombadil

The other day in Brighton we had a decadent Sunday, lying in our B&B watching the first part of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. It seemed the perfect thing to do on a grey and slightly bleary afternoon.

Somewhat wedded to the book (which I read many times as a nerdy teenager) and the BBC Radio 4 version, I was a slow convert to the films. I've grown to like them in a grumbling, curmudgeonly sort of a way, though the preference for VFX over acting (Wormtongue's hold over Theoden, for example), the interminable, manufactured cliff-hangers (literally in the case of Frodo at Mount Doom), and Legolas' skateboard stunt at Helm's Deep were all unforgiveable in my book.

I find books and radio so much more satisfying than film or TV because they leave you free to do the imagining. But while the star-studded Radio version kept the music, poetry and songs that pepper the book and make it so alive, even it ditched poor old Tom Bombadil in the interests of brevity. I'm sure he never stood a chance in Hollywood. Too camp. Too odd. (The following fine picture is by Alessandra Cimatoribus).



Jim Penny recently reminded me of a crucial fact about Tom Bombadil, one that I'd totally forgotten: when Bombadil tries on the ring it has no effect on him at all. In fact, he makes it disappear, just for a moment, using sleight of hand. Nor can Frodo hide - Bombadil easily spots the otherwise invisible hobbit trying to escape.

Here's a thing. The forces of evil have no effect on this ancient, nature-worshipping, queer-punning, rhyming clown. The holy fool stands outside of it all, untouchable. The last laugh is his (and probably the first too).

Isn't this the key scene in the whole epic saga?

Strange that it's always the first to end up on the cutting room floor.

Day of the Dead

As regular readers will know, May Morning is a big occasion here in Oxford, and for a number of years we've been going out with a bunch of fellow bohos and ne'er-do-wells - The Hurly Burly Band - playing rumbustious music at 6am, tickling the crowds and raising the spirit of summer.

Well, good magical practice dictates that whatever you summon up you must put back to bed again, so three years ago we started a new tradition, going out in the evening of November 2nd and playing for the Mexican Day of the Dead, to lay summer to rest.




Hold on a minute, I hear all the Pagans among you cry. Haven't we got our own, perfectly respectable festival of autumn and the dead, Samhain or Halloween? Why import someone else's?


Our reasoning was this: Halloween is hopelessly lost to us. What used to be a rather homely festival of roast chestnuts and ghost stories and apple-bobbing and fires has become just another great festival of consumption, dedicated to the forces of Mammon. I've always despised trick or treat, with its reified, kiddified, candy-coated extortion, and now for grown-ups Halloween is just a big fancy-dress party, another excuse to get mashed in the working week. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for dressing up. It's just that I'm looking for a festival with a bit more meaning. We dare not forget the dead.

So, yes, our Day of the Dead is an appropriation, but it is already something else. It is genuinely our Day of the Dead, and for the time being at least it remains untainted by the forces of capitalism.


And I particularly love the fact that no one is expecting it. We barely advertise, mostly rely on passers by, some of whom stop, join in, dance.


This year the music moved through distinct moods, from a kind of cold austerity, through grief (for many of us, this has been quite a tough year, and I'm sure people were remembering friends and relatives who've passed), and finally into a kind of defiant, upbeat effervescence. We pulled a large crowd and they were dancing. The magic was done. Proper.


(Thanks to Hafiz for this last, evocative photo. Says it all, I think).