Yesterday went to the Green Man Playgroup Easter Fayre. That’s a pagan double whammy. The whole idea of an Easter Fayre being the celebration of the Saxon spring goddess of Eostre "whose feast was the vernal equinox and whose animal was the spring hare". The eggs that the kids hunted for in a box of shredded tissue paper are the symbols of the rebirth of the countryside. That this quaint afternoon out was organised by the Green Man Playgroup (named after the Green Man roundabout, itself named after the famous inn of that name where Dick Turpin was alleged to have drank, but as Nick once said, find me a pub on the edge of London that doesn’t claim a Turpin reference) was apt as the Green Man being the leafy deity of May and is also associate with rebirth:"...There are legends of him (Khidr) in which, like Osiris, he is dismembered and reborn; and prophecies connecting him, like the Green Man, with the end of time. His name means the Green One or Verdant One, he is the voice of inspiration to the aspirant and committed artist. He can come as a white light or the gleam on a blade of grass, but more often as an inner mood. The sign of his presence is the ability to work or experience with tireless enthusiasm beyond one's normal capacities. In this there may be a link across cultures, ... one reason for the enthusiasm of the medieval sculptors for the Green Man may be that he was the source of inspiration." — William Anderson, "Green Man: The Archetype of our Oneness with the Earth"
The hall sits in the grounds of the Welsh church – which I reckon is just a modern manifestation of Druidary. It’s my theory that the Druids adopted a tactic of entryism into the church a bit like Trotskyists joining the Labour Party. The atmosphere reminded me of the village jumble sales of my childhood except for the frenzy of excitement over the raffle the like of which I haven’t seen since I witness the raffling of tinned fruit at my Nan’s old people’s home in the early 80’s. I couldn’t convince my 3 year old that the South Park figures were worth buying, but at 10 pence I allowed myself a little indulgence.
The sense of pagan festivities had been signalled by the arrival of an envelope in the morning from the mystical and brilliant Bodmin Moor Explorer. Bodmin’s photo on his/her Myspace profile is of a Humpty Dumpty type character – a pace egg of sorts (I’m sure Bodmin will clarify this – my folklore is a bit sketchy). The envelope contained a copy of Network News a zine of folklore of mystical stuff published by Earthly Delights, some subversive postcards (Bodmin can’t possibly have known that the day before I’d been researching the basis of the fictional ‘red mercury dirty bomb plot’ could he?) and a badge that I shall attach to my walking jacket.
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I'm positively gladdened to hear of the frenzy at the jumble sale. I recently went to my first of these for years (although the pursuit of the useless, broken and discarded has been assiduously continued in charity shops and boot fairs across the land for the intervening time). It is billed as a Table-Top Sale and occurs regularly... which might have something to do with it... but I turned up at the appointed hour, thinking I must have made a mistake - nobody was queueing - no faintly menacing, elderly women with more facial hair than I, no men of indeterminate age in soiled anorak clutching an equally soiled red-white-and-blue candy-striped laundry bag - nobody at all. I wandered into the cavernous church hall - abustle with helpers distributing the stock but no customers.
I began mooching through the books laid out on the table, tensed, waiting for the admonishment from a steely-eyed helper telling me that they weren't open yet. But everyone smiled at me (including the gods) and all the books were 50p. Picked up a nice Grove edition of Black Spring, a 1st ed of The Songlines among other things, including The Fabulous Flounder Game, a Spears game where one assembles fish at the throw of a dice...
All this was great, but somehow souless, there was no thrill of the chase, no violence from elders used only to the company of cats, no jostling, no pushing, just cheap, good quality jumble in abundance. I'll go again, but I miss the sense of urgency, the sudden sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as someone grabs something just as my fingers were about to close on it, the gritting of teeth when you stand next to someone paying 25p for a recording of Aldous Huxley discussing his mescaline sessions, and just how funny it is to be pushed out of the way by an eighty year old desperate for a rusty egg slicer. I had thought this all gone - but your report give me hope.
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