Christmas Customs

While searching for a video of the traditional Boxing Day Marshfield Mummer's Play...




...I came across the following video of a krampus festival in the alps. Unlike the (supposedly) benign Santa Claus, the krampus takes naughty children away in his bag and eats them. This is genuinely scary. Makes our English folk customs, however wonderful they are, seem a little, um, tame...

Ho ho ho

Of all the myths about magic mushrooms, the one I most wanted to be true was that Father Christmas is secretly and originally a fly-agaric munching shaman from Siberia. Alas, there's very little evidence that he was, and rather a lot to suggest he wasn't, and it turns out this myth was invented by the poet, Robert Graves, in one of his poetic flights of fancy, back in the early 70s.


But while researching Shroom, I discovered something interesting: Santa Claus and Father Christmas are not the same figure at all (see Ronald Hutton's The Stations of the Sun). Saint Nicholas, and the tradition of leaving presents for children on Saint Nicholas' eve, arrived in America with the Dutch, at their colony on Manhatten island. By the time New Amsterdam had become New York, Saint Nicholas had been quite forgotten, that is until he was revived by Washington Irving who transplanted the saint's traditions to Christmas Eve.

Irving inspired others. Most of the imagery associated with Santa (flying reindeer, chimneys and all) comes from one subsequent source, Clement Clark Moore's saccharine poem T'was the night before Christmas: the rest was cooked up by artist Thomas Nast and the advertising executives at a popular fizzy drink manufacturer (who need not be named). In other words, the modern Santa Claus is an American confection.

I've just written about my feelings towards the festive season for Spiral Earth so I shan't repeat them here, but it seems to me that everything that is wrong with Christmas is encapsulated by Santa: the consumption, the excess, the mad rush at a time when we should be still, the shmaltz and pester-power, the pretence that this is all somehow magic.

No wonder people like me need Santa to be something else, something genuinely rooted in the myths and traditions of what is an ancient midwinter festival, one that exists not to sell us stuff, but to heave body and soul through the dark days ahead. If Graves had dug just a little deeper in his quest to find re-enchantment he would have realised that he didn't need to invent a spurious shamanic tradition for Santa: he could just have drawn attention to the English figure that Santa superceded and who is more than fit for purpose - Father Christmas.

According to Hutton, people began to personify Christmas here in the seventeenth century (that's tradition aplenty). There was always something slightly unruly about Sir, Lord or Father Christmas, concerned as he was with feasting, merry-making and adult concerns. As such he appears in various seventeenth century masques and still, today, in Mummers Plays. This photo doesn't depict Father Christmas, but you get the idea...


In my imagination Father Christmas becomes a swarthy figure, crowned with holly, mistletoe and yew, carrying a double-headed axe (with which to sort out Gawain) and a flagon of magic winter solstice brew. No presents. No mad rushing about trying to meet the insatiable demands of children. No ersatz gestures. Just an ancient figure with a story or two, hoying us through the night with a fart, a joke and a twinkle in his eye. High time, then, that we rid ourselves of Santa, the gaudy imposter, and bring back the true spirit of Christmas.

And on that note, have yourselves a happy Yule. Whatever you do, may it work it's ancient magic upon you. Thank you for reading, and I'll be back in the new year for more. See you then.

Time machine

On our respective eighth birthdays my father bought me and my brother a camera each, a Kodak Instamatic (we were at that squabblesome age where all presents had to be identical). Here's a photo taken by my brother of me with my parents, somewhere on Dartmoor.


And here's one of the first photos I ever took, of Sandy our new labrador puppy, back in 1976. I know it's 1976 because that was the year of the drought and you can see how dry the ground is.


I still have the camera and for some reason or other I turned it out earlier this autumn.


Imagine my surprise when I discovered there was still a half-finished film inside. I had no idea what could be on it. And then I found out that it's still possible to get film processed, at a price, so we finished it off and took it to the printers.

This is the first picture I saw when I opened the envelope, and immediately I knew where I was.


The year was 1986. I was eighteen and had just left school. This is Susannah, my girlfriend at the time. It was early autumn and we were stomping around the fields behind my childhood home in Devon. Gap years meant we went our separate ways and I haven't seen her since (if you're reading this Susannah - hallo! I hope life did you well).

Looking over my shoulder, the shop assistant was most apologetic about the print quality. "There's dust on the lens, see. It would all look better in black and white." I smiled and said nothing. For me it's the random effects of light, age and chemistry that make these images so compelling.

Here's Susannah again, with our house behind her. Sandy died after eating poison, so that's Pip you can see in the bottom right.


We must have gone to the legendary Friday market in hippy hangout Totnes (a stronger contender for Goblin Market you'll be hard put to find) for here's a character who used to wander round with a parrot on his shoulder (and a streak of guano down his back). Someone told me he's dead now. The jangled colours make him look like a ghost.


Fast forward twenty five years and I am back on Dartmoor, but married now, another chapter of the same story laid out on a single papyral roll of film.



We take photos to help us remember, precisely because our memory is not photographic. It can't be trusted. Colours fade. Events blur. Timings become uncertain (I had quite forgotten that autumn day with Susannah - maybe it was our last together?).



But even photos, with their uncanny ability to freeze time, make ghosts of us all. We are already shades.

Evolution of a classic

I was excited after our recent Wod gig in North Wootton when Mike York played me some Turkish sipsi music. The sipsi is a small reedpipe, played using circular breathing, with a wild and thrilling sound. I was immediately captivated by the lumpy nine-time rhythms and mind-boggling technique.



On its own the sipsi can sound a bit naked, which is why it is usually accompanied by other instruments, but this got me thinking about the evolution of the bagpipe. Reedpipes are found all across Europe and the near East, from the Welsh pibgorn to the Rajasthan pungi, and though known in Antiquity are probably much older.

One solution to the thinness of the sound is to play two pipes together. The slight discrepancies in tuning create a chorus effect that is a bit unnerving.



The other possibility is to add a drone pipe, one that plays a constant note and which grounds the melodies and improvisations. The instrument now has its own accompaniment.



While blowing gives you greater control, and means you can gain extra notes in the upper register or use the tongue to produce articulation, it's not very pleasant having two long reeds in your mouth. I wonder who the genius was who, looking at the animal skins used for carrying water and wine, realised they could be used with the reedpipe to create the necessary reservoir of air.



This is not the instrument of Apollo, but of Marsyas the satyr. It's for making us dance, inspiring us to ecstacy with repetitive rhythms, percussive melodies and wonky temperaments.



All these pipes use a single reed, and single-reed pipes are still found in Eastern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Sweden and Wales.




But the final development was the double-reed and the discovery of how to drill out conically-bored chanters. This was probably an Arab innovation.

Thus it was that the double-reeded bagpipe, as we know it in the West, spread up through Western Europe in the Middle Ages, perhaps from Islamic Spain or brought back with crusaders.

It's the kind I play. I love the instrument's ancientness. It's part of the pleasure it brings.

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).

Our daily bread

Earlier this year I met John Letts of the Oxford Bread Group, a campaigner for real bread and a grower of old, endangered varieties of wheat. He drew my attention to the evils of the Chorley Wood Process, the industrial method by which 80% of our bread is constructed. I use that word advisedly - the CWP is so alien to traditional bread making I wonder if its products ought to be called bread at all. Cheap flour, fat, yeast and a cocktail of enzymes are whipped into a blamanche in an industrial vat with little or no time to prove, before being bunged in an oven. No wonder it's so indigestable.

Instead, he persuaded me of the wonders of sourdough. Why not make your own, he said? Well, I did. I am a complete convert.

I followed the River Cottage Method - there's a helpful video too.

Sourdough uses naturally occurring yeast. You create a starter culture by mixing flour and water and waiting for the yeast to do its thing. I helped mine along by adding two scrumped plums to the mix - apparently a stick of rhubarb works just as well. Don't be tempted to use brewers yeast - it's a different species I'm told. You keep the starter in a jar and as long as you keep feeding it more flour it will last forever.


It smells yeasty, tart, a little scary.


The beauty of natural yeast is that it works slowly. I leave my bread to prove all day, and that's when the yeast does its magic, killing off microbes and digesting the gluten. It's wonderful watching this


become this


become this


become this


It tastes delicious.

People often wonder how it is that Amazonian Indians discovered ayahuasca, the strange hallucinogenic brew and mainstay of Amazonian shamanism that requires two very different plants to be mixed together for it to work. How, given all the plants that grow in the rainforest, did they hit on the magic combination?

I find bread just as baffling. Who was it who discovered that adding a fizzy mix of yeast to flour, kneeding it until it works, letting it rise and baking it, produced the wondrous loaf? Was it trial and error? A moment of inspiration? It is a breathtaking piece of human ingenuity, up there with the bicycle and the laptop.

Making my own has connected me to the process, made me more aware of where my food comes from and awakened me to the magic of this humble, taken for granted, staple of Western diet. My digestion has improved too. I shan't be going back to shop-bought.

Why not give it a go?

A trip to Wales

A sneaky midweek trip to Wales. The fields were quiet(ish) but the hills were alive.

Duotone launch

Played with Wod at a fantastic gig on Saturday night, to launch the new, stunning, Duotone album. Nomi performed too, along with Colin and Jane from Telling the Bees, and poet and master of ceremonies, Alan Buckley. Happily Kate Raworth was there to catch the event - you can see all her photos here, and some backstage images of mine here. It was as good as it looks - a privilege to know so many talented musicians and performers.

Anniversary

Managed to get away the other weekend for our first wedding anniversary, a wee trip home to Devon and Dartmoor.

In glorious, warm, unseasonal sunny weather we followed the mossy boulders of the Dart valley, then climbed a granite outcrop.


Then up to Sharp Tor where the view is magnificent and you can almost see all the way to the South Hams, where I grew up.


From there to Yar Tor. You can't see from the photo but someone has made an Andy Goldsworthy-style sculpture, making a large drystone-wall-spiral.


Back to the Dart to dibble our toes and do a little yoga. I seem to remember coming here for one of my childhood birthday parties - nostalgiarama.




Then to Moretonhampstead to our B&B and a slap-up meal at the White Horse.


Proper.