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ventaWell, I had a thoroughly surreal hour in the middle of my day. I went a-wassailing in Stanford Dingley with OBJ.
I've been out performing one of those useful rituals which most people probably don't realise are necessary. I bet you just think apple trees get on with growing and bearing apples and so on, don't you ?
You're wrong, of course. Apple trees (and, occasionally, other trees as well) are at terrible risk from demons and other malignant spirits. It's only thanks to the tireless actions of those who go out wassailing apple trees every year that we get any fruit at all.
Mind you, even by my standards this was a bit of an odd wassailing ceremony. I report it as it happened, but have a sneaky feeling that several different traditions had got somehow tangled up together.
Mabel, OBJ, and several other teams met up at The Bull in the village of Stanford Dingley. It's a large, sprawly pub which serves good beer (Pintwatch was, sadly, driving but managed to get a decent-sized pot of tea for £1.20). OBJ maintain that it's the best pub in Berkshire, so choose to hold their annual wassail there. Of course, the one drawback is that it doesn't possess an apple tree.
OBJ aren't easily daunted, however, and they brought their own. In a pot. And it sat on a table outside the pub.
We began with the traditional morris passtimes of dancing in the road and pissing off the traffic. Then they started dishing out the wassail cake. This turned out to be fruitcake, but with the warning to watch out for the bean. Somewhere in the cake was a bean (a dried one, I presume). We had been instructed:
Be careful of the bean. And there is to be no surreptitious spitting out or swallowing of the bean. Whoever gets the bean will, according to their gender (and orientation), be nominated the King or Queen of the Wassail. And they have to choose a person of the opposite gender to be their consort.
<cue much heckling from the assembled company demanding to know why, in this day and age, it had to be of the opposite gender>
A lady found the bean in her cake, was duly crowned, chose herself a consort who was also crowned, and they were made to stand on the table next to the diminutive apple tree.
The apple tree was beaten (actually, owing to its small stature and lack of resilience it was lightly tapped. It had toast hung in its branches (this bit is traditional, though I forget why) and had its roots libated with cider (looked a funny colour to me, I think it must have been bitter). A small wren ("bought at very little expense from Woolworths" - apparently they'd decided the traditional hunt to catch a real one was a little cruel) was wrapped in a cotton shroud and buried at the tree's roots by the king and queen. Finally a gun was fired through the tree's branches, and a volley of whistling, banging, yelling, stamping and other noising was made to scare the demons away.
The last wassail I attended was run by the Coventry Mummers, a surprising number of whom appear to have gunpowder licences and a startling array of 17thC weaponry. Today, however, was tamer with a small pop-gun being pressed into service.
All this was accompanied by an array of traditional songs, sung by the assembled company. Sometimes not all to the same tune, and not often at the same time.
The afternoon rounded off with a mummers' play, also in the road to piss off the traffic. I got slightly confused, because mummers' plays tend to have a cast of "stock" characters - St George (hurray!) and the Turkish Knight (boohiss!) and random assortment of doctors, fools, devils etc.
This contained Father Christmas (hurray!), King George (looked like St George to me, but turned out to be a boohiss!), a Turkish Knight (boohiss!, I think), Jack (unsure), the King of Egypt (I thought he was a boohiss!, but he was fighting King George, which probably makes him a hurray!) and some others I couldn't quite follow. Dammit, moral ambiguity and not being sure who to hiss at and who to cheer is not what you look for in a mummers' play. Good corpse count, though, the doctor had to revive four people.
Mind you, the doctor also arrived wearing a stripey scarf, followed by K9, and revived the corpses with a sonic screwdriver. I'm not sure how traditional that is.
Incidentally, a passing note: OBJ are named after the slang term "OBJ" for alcohol. I grew up round people who regularly used the phrase to mean anything from a nice pint to the brandy that was going in the Christmas cake. It's short for oh-be-joyful, although that's something I only realised relatively recently. As is the way with a small child's unanalytical ears, I happily accepted that obyjoyful (all one word) was a synonym for booze.
I was surprised this afternoon to hear a lot of people saying "so what does OBJ stand for ? Old Berkshire... ?" Are other people familiar with the phrase ?
The best bit is that, despite Standford Dingley being hidden in a tangled mess of white roads south of the M4[*], I managed to get both to it and from it without getting lost. How ? With my trusty Berkshire A-Z.
For too long I've relied on a few print-out maps from multimap/google or (worse) directions from multimap/google. Things never work out as expected, the maps are wrong, the directions are wronger, you find you haven't printed the right pages at the right level of detail, you get diverted... This time I looked at my A-Z last night, calculated a route, and followed it without hitch. And if I had hit a hitch, I had a map of all of Berkshire in glorious detail to sort myself out again. A-Z's are great.
[*] Probably quite close to the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
uitlander's stamping ground, I noticed on my return journey. Apologies for not noticing this earlier and flagging up any interested parties.
I've been out performing one of those useful rituals which most people probably don't realise are necessary. I bet you just think apple trees get on with growing and bearing apples and so on, don't you ?
You're wrong, of course. Apple trees (and, occasionally, other trees as well) are at terrible risk from demons and other malignant spirits. It's only thanks to the tireless actions of those who go out wassailing apple trees every year that we get any fruit at all.
Mind you, even by my standards this was a bit of an odd wassailing ceremony. I report it as it happened, but have a sneaky feeling that several different traditions had got somehow tangled up together.
Mabel, OBJ, and several other teams met up at The Bull in the village of Stanford Dingley. It's a large, sprawly pub which serves good beer (Pintwatch was, sadly, driving but managed to get a decent-sized pot of tea for £1.20). OBJ maintain that it's the best pub in Berkshire, so choose to hold their annual wassail there. Of course, the one drawback is that it doesn't possess an apple tree.
OBJ aren't easily daunted, however, and they brought their own. In a pot. And it sat on a table outside the pub.
We began with the traditional morris passtimes of dancing in the road and pissing off the traffic. Then they started dishing out the wassail cake. This turned out to be fruitcake, but with the warning to watch out for the bean. Somewhere in the cake was a bean (a dried one, I presume). We had been instructed:
Be careful of the bean. And there is to be no surreptitious spitting out or swallowing of the bean. Whoever gets the bean will, according to their gender (and orientation), be nominated the King or Queen of the Wassail. And they have to choose a person of the opposite gender to be their consort.
<cue much heckling from the assembled company demanding to know why, in this day and age, it had to be of the opposite gender>
A lady found the bean in her cake, was duly crowned, chose herself a consort who was also crowned, and they were made to stand on the table next to the diminutive apple tree.
The apple tree was beaten (actually, owing to its small stature and lack of resilience it was lightly tapped. It had toast hung in its branches (this bit is traditional, though I forget why) and had its roots libated with cider (looked a funny colour to me, I think it must have been bitter). A small wren ("bought at very little expense from Woolworths" - apparently they'd decided the traditional hunt to catch a real one was a little cruel) was wrapped in a cotton shroud and buried at the tree's roots by the king and queen. Finally a gun was fired through the tree's branches, and a volley of whistling, banging, yelling, stamping and other noising was made to scare the demons away.
The last wassail I attended was run by the Coventry Mummers, a surprising number of whom appear to have gunpowder licences and a startling array of 17thC weaponry. Today, however, was tamer with a small pop-gun being pressed into service.
All this was accompanied by an array of traditional songs, sung by the assembled company. Sometimes not all to the same tune, and not often at the same time.
The afternoon rounded off with a mummers' play, also in the road to piss off the traffic. I got slightly confused, because mummers' plays tend to have a cast of "stock" characters - St George (hurray!) and the Turkish Knight (boohiss!) and random assortment of doctors, fools, devils etc.
This contained Father Christmas (hurray!), King George (looked like St George to me, but turned out to be a boohiss!), a Turkish Knight (boohiss!, I think), Jack (unsure), the King of Egypt (I thought he was a boohiss!, but he was fighting King George, which probably makes him a hurray!) and some others I couldn't quite follow. Dammit, moral ambiguity and not being sure who to hiss at and who to cheer is not what you look for in a mummers' play. Good corpse count, though, the doctor had to revive four people.
Mind you, the doctor also arrived wearing a stripey scarf, followed by K9, and revived the corpses with a sonic screwdriver. I'm not sure how traditional that is.
Incidentally, a passing note: OBJ are named after the slang term "OBJ" for alcohol. I grew up round people who regularly used the phrase to mean anything from a nice pint to the brandy that was going in the Christmas cake. It's short for oh-be-joyful, although that's something I only realised relatively recently. As is the way with a small child's unanalytical ears, I happily accepted that obyjoyful (all one word) was a synonym for booze.
I was surprised this afternoon to hear a lot of people saying "so what does OBJ stand for ? Old Berkshire... ?" Are other people familiar with the phrase ?
The best bit is that, despite Standford Dingley being hidden in a tangled mess of white roads south of the M4[*], I managed to get both to it and from it without getting lost. How ? With my trusty Berkshire A-Z.
For too long I've relied on a few print-out maps from multimap/google or (worse) directions from multimap/google. Things never work out as expected, the maps are wrong, the directions are wronger, you find you haven't printed the right pages at the right level of detail, you get diverted... This time I looked at my A-Z last night, calculated a route, and followed it without hitch. And if I had hit a hitch, I had a map of all of Berkshire in glorious detail to sort myself out again. A-Z's are great.
[*] Probably quite close to the
uitlander's stamping ground, I noticed on my return journey. Apologies for not noticing this earlier and flagging up any interested parties.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 10:32 pm (UTC)Also, a discussion about a Lancashire phrase, "Well, I'll go to the foot of our stairs" has arisen on a friend's LJ. This seems like your kind of thing - don't suppose you can illuminate the discussion?
no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 10:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 11:05 pm (UTC)Nope, because that entry's friends-locked ;)
I occasionally say "well, I'll go to the goot of our stairs", though more commonly "well, I'll go to our house". It's just a general expression of surprise in a well-I-never sort of way. I have no idea why, though.
The wren was small, gold, and very plastic.
JFGI
Date: 2006-01-22 11:24 pm (UTC)But, just in case you aren't aware: "Hey! Google turns up ..." (you can probably fill in the rest).
no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 11:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 11:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 11:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 03:31 am (UTC)*dances with joy*
no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 06:21 am (UTC)Is there a programme of the Rapper events on the web? I had a look on the Mabel link which has last year's programme on it? I'd like to turn up to one or two as it sounds entertaining.
BTW 'OBJ' is a new one on me, but then with teetotal parents its unlikely I'd have heard anything like that in my yoof.
Re: JFGI
Date: 2006-01-23 09:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 09:24 am (UTC)Sorry, didn't realise the entry was friends-locked, but you're not really missing much beyond a couple of people saying they're not really sure, but putting forward possible suggestions. Everyone seems to know what it means, but not why it means that.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 10:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 12:21 pm (UTC)if it was a plastic wren does that mean all cider this year is going to taste of aspartame aka Strongbow?
If not well done for helping make some good cider.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 06:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 07:32 pm (UTC)Will tell you when I've done it.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 08:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-24 11:33 pm (UTC)