May sayings

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.*

No doubt about that as the gales buffet the fruit trees creating a snowstorm of apple blossom. Our hopes for a huge crop of apples to puree and freeze or trade with the cider maker for a share of last year's output is diminishing with every blast. The plums may have suffered the same fate though they were further advanced and the gean tree has shed a load of nascent bird cherries. 

 What will the blackies and fieldfares do come Autumn and what of the wood mouse who lives in the hedge and whose winter stores of cherry stones I find, each opened like a can of beans to get the kernels ?

May is a spectacularly variable month for weather, scorching sunshine then squalls of rain and wind to follow within a day. No sooner have we got the sun-lounger out than we are putting it away before it tumbles in the wind like a huge daddy-long-legs across the grass.

Ne'er cast a cloot 'til (the) may is oot. **

Last week with its scorching days, proved this a truism as the may blossom burst forth in frothy splendour with their their strange musky sweet scent heavy in the hot sun then, capricious as ever the wind blew in from the North and changed the adage to its commoner interpretation - ne'er cast a cloot 'til May is oot. 

The Merry month of May

The merriest month in all the year is the merry month of May***

A time for courting or "winching" as the Scots would have it, a time for the maypole with its significance, a time for May queens, a time when the may and May become fused into one great celebration of love and fertility.

Near us is the village of Polwarth, remembered in verse by Alan Ramsay in his Polwarth on the Green.

    At Polwart on the green

If you’ll meet me on the morn

Where lasses do conveen

To dance around the thorn

There was a tradition of newly-weds out walk around the hawthorn tree presumably a folk memory of an old fertility rite. Fortunately, the tree still survives and a descendant tree has been grown along side its ancient sire.

The Polwarth Thorn

Young love, fertility symbolism, the queens of the May, the green man, dancing round the may pole.

No wonder that May is the merriest month.

Here we come gathering nuts in May

Nuts in May

On a cold and frosty morning

Yes there are some cold and frosty mornings in May but nuts? There aren't ever nuts in May. It would seem it's really "knots" in May. Knots or bouquets of may flowers collected as part of a children's game pairing boys and girls, an echo of an older custom of choosing a spouse and so we come round again to May being the merriest of the months!

Knots of may

Fertility rites, Beltane (La Beulltain) fires, leaping over the flames, feasting with special bannocks and possets, washing your face in the dew......
...and now we make do with a bank holiday!

*     W.S.
**   Anon
*** Ballad

in not so splendid isolation

It's a surreal world we are living in. Social isolation, communication by internet, conversations across the width of a road. This pestilence has changed the way we live, possibly for ever.

We are lucky, living in a small village in the county.

We can walk for miles in our permitted exercise time without seeing a soul and yet the spring continues to burst out in the gardens and woods unaware of our human restrictions. Unthinking about our problems, the rest of the planet just gets on with what it has always done.

Violets bloom on a bank, a buzzard screams in the sky, the summer visitors arrive, the warblers and the swallows come back to their old haunts, the badgers seek new setts, oblivious of us.

"that breathes upon a bank of violets"

Viola odorata

Our ancient village has seen it all before

There is a plague stone near the edge of the village. Almost four hundred years ago, the inhabitants of Northfield, then a small hamlet, now a large farm, were struck by an outbreak of plague and quarantined. People didn't really understand the germ theory but they knew that contact spread the contagion so they filled the basin in the top of the stone with vinegar and the folk from Northfield would put their coins in the vinegar to buy food.

Today, the local butcher brought eggs, fresh vegetables and fruit to the doorstep and we left the money for him in an envelope. Plus ca change!

Yet people are risking their lives to minister to the sick, to care for the vulnerable, and to treat and save the seriously afflicted. We appreciate them now but will we continue to do so when the plague is defeated or will we go back to idolising vacuous "personalities", sports persons and commentators, game show hosts and all their associated trivia and lavishing vast sums upon them when their contribution is, as we have discovered, at best borderline and mostly unnecessary. 
 We shall see.

*Twelfth Night  W.S.