a-wassail-what?

Have you ever been a-wassailing? I have been a-wassailing.

Yesterday I went to a wassail, in my capacity as a pretender to morris. There is a first time for everything.

There is a long-held British tradition of shouting until you get what you want. And this is where we have developed the timeless and un-rivalled technique for procuring large quantities of tasty alcoholic beverages. Singing for your supper and all that, standing caterwauling someone’s front door until pies appear, paying the morris men (as they did) in beer. It’s working for us, why break with tradition?

In the case of wassail, we sing to the trees.

The day for me was spent in the foreyard of a small pub somewhere in the vicinity of Sevenoaks. After a long (and chilly!) afternoon of dancing and laughing and the consuming of several pints of the large range of barrelled beers that were lined up along the bar, us morris lots were done and we began the wassail proper. Now, wassailing, as I have discovered, is a thing. We led a grand torch-lit procession down the road and into the orchard, where we proceeded with the rictual of blessing the trees, waking them from their winter slumber in the hopes of their yielding a fine crop for this year. A single tree is picked to be wassailed (big orchard and that). Turns out that they were pear trees, not apple as I had thought, but it’s all good.

So, there are parts to wassailing. And many of them are a little bit alarming, so the first thing we have to offer is a wee bit of bread for the birdies. Because if you want fertile soil, it’s important that the birds feel able to come sit in the branches and poop on your roots. Naturally, you invite them. So a few little bits are attached to one of the lower branches for them to spot in the morning.

When that’s done, the wassailing bowl is taken – a wide double-handled cup filled with the best steaming cider – and poured out in offering over the tree’s roots. Now, I maintain that this smacks of apple-tree cannibalism, but who am I to question working rictual? We followed our offering with the singing of a wassailing song, voices raised with a band of jolly accordion music, to serenade the tree. It was a thing of beauty, if not of great tunefulness.

The next bit of the blessing involves scaring the shit out of the tree and just about anyone within a five-mile radius. I do very much wonder what any passing stranger might have thought we were doing in a darkened orchard. So the man at the head took his musket and shot it into the air, and we followed by our crowd taking up our pipes, drums, sticks, hands and voices, and anything else lying about and made as much noise as was humanly possible. After that, the tree, indeed the orchard, was considered to be well woken for this spring, and any evil spirits with an ounce of sense will hopefully have flown from the racket. So we processed back in the dark to the sound of bagpipes (not traditional, but then our morris side isn’t very), and gravitated towards warm hearths and hearty drinks. Good times. It was a jolly way to spend a day.

The term wassail comes from the Old English wæs (þu) hæl – ‘be hearty’, ‘be whole’. Certainly, I think so.

I watch the stars from my windowsill…

When I was travelling over the winter holidays, I had a thought. I’d left Iona, spent nights on coaches and was homeless, sleeping on the lent beds of some lovely friends. Living out my rucksack,  and duly carting it around with me, as I do tend to do. Not really going anywhere, just being somewhere to waste time.

Wandering then, for the first time in a long while, I had the thought ‘I want to go home’. And when I do have that thought, it seems a silly thing. Not only because of its self-indulgent, whiny nature, but because I don’t think I really know where ‘home’ is.

I wanted to come back to Alban Hall, to my little room, to my own bed and routine and space to be. I wanted to be somewhere that was mine. But is this place my home? I live here, I spend my days in this little green square, but on the other hand I’m not engaged with the life of college, with the people here and the life of the building. It’s just some space that I’ve been given, and I’m aware that it’s only for just now.

I have a more permanent address. Two. Places I lived in for years before this, and still have a bed whenever I should ask. Do the two houses of my parents feel like home? Probably not. But they are.

I’ve lived with both sets of grandparents at one time and another, that was my home and I did a fair chunk of growing up there. Surely I have to give that a place?

There are places where I’ve made my home for a while. My room in halls at Warwick with its flooding bathroom, a bed loaned to me on Iona where my whole living was shared with everyone else, even living in someone else’s home while I was working for them. Short term, but what I had. In all those cases, because I didn’t have anywhere else.

Woodlarks perhaps feels most homely in the sense of familiarity and security in returning. It’s the only place I’ve come home to year after year, to people I love and to happiness, and which has remained constant throughout my life. I’ve been to that site every year since bumphood, and it’s as much a part of me as any other home I’ve had (to many, more so) – I couldn’t bear a year at this point where I didn’t go back.

There will be many other places, perhaps, that I learn to call home. I don’t know why, and I don’t know where they’ll be. I don’t know what they’ll mean to me. But then I hardly know that about any of these homes of mine.

I tend to blow about somewhat. I’m not rooted in any one place. I often find it difficult to name my hometown or tell where I come from, because I’m from London and from Kent, the city and the country, from my mother’s, father’s, and my grandparents’, I call most of South London ‘mine’ – familiar, and I know most of the city like I’d know my own town. All of these places are homes to me, and at the same time none of them. And I don’t feel at a loss for that, nor do I feel a want. I don’t like to be tied down, I don’t plan to commit to a town and a home and settling any time soon, and from what I know I seriously doubt that I ever will. I guess I don’t really need to have a home, but there are places to be my home. Some for a short while, and some to which I will always come back with embrace. And that works for me.

I guess it’s weird to think ‘which home’s next?’.

Plans. Planly plans.

I’m just going to put the zebra here. Almost a warning. You’re welcome.

…And let each new year find you a better man.

What can be said in New Year rhymes,
That’s not been said a thousand times?
The new years come, the old years go,
We know we dream, we dream we know.
We rise up laughing with the light,
We lie down weeping with the night.
We hug the world until it stings,
We curse it then and sigh for wings.
We live, we love, we woo, we wed,
We wreathe our prides, we sheet our dead.
We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,
And that’s the burden of a year.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

I posted this poem to my LJ exactly one year ago. It seemed soppy then, and still does. However, at the end of this year, it seems something of an appropriate summary. It’s been hard and it’s been wonderful and it’s been a million other silly things. It will probably do so again. Gee whizz. Well, I hope 2012 sees you happy, and that life is lovely, and that there is peace within and without. Who knows what’s to happen? May it be awesome.