Marking Time

Today is a bank holiday in the UK, once called the Whitsun bank holiday. One of those little bits of trivia tucked away in the brain that’s never really interrogated. The half-remembered poem by Phillip Larkin, hot weather and wedding parties on a train, vague recollections of working class families visiting the seaside (mainly based on my childhood reading of The Family from One End Street), half-formed images of May queens and girls in white dresses. The things we forget we know. On consultation with my friend Wikipedia I discovered that Whitsun is the seventh Sunday after Easter, and in Christian belief marks “the descent of the holy spirit on Jesus’ disciples” (which sounds vaguely uncomfortable to my heathen ears). The day after Whitsun was known as Whit Monday and was made a bank holiday in 1871, marked for 100 years and then abolished in 1971. The moveable nature of the festival was removed and it was then fixed as the last Monday in May for the more prosaically named Spring Bank Holiday.

High days and holidays are a way of marking time, which sends me off on a spiral of thought about other forms of time, and the way that a week can both feel packed with incident and completely exhausting, but at the same time it rushes past and when someone asks “how was your week”, I struggle to remember exactly what it was that I did. Academic time catches hold of you when your child enters the education system, suddenly your year is marked out in a regimented pattern of terms, including the peculiarly anachronistic long summer break in July and August, which is tied to an older calendar. When primary school education became compulsory in 1870, the summer holiday was a concession to parents who relied on their children to help bring in the harvest. As previously discussed, exam time comes parcelled in with academic time, although we are thankfully in the lull of a week of grace over half term.

On Saturday I joined a foraging walk led by Steve England, somewhat of a local legend in Bristol. The heat was already beginning to build as I cycled over (there’s a big hill between where I live and Stoke Park where the walk was planned) and sticky with suncream I hoped it would be worth it. Freewheeling on the way back I would say it definitely was worth the effort, my head is sparked full of ideas and new learning. We began on the meadow in Stoke Park, a place I have visited many times before with work, but have probably been guilty of overlooking as a backdrop. Steve urged us to slow down, to really look, it reminded me of Rebecca Solnit writing about thinking at walking speed. “Really looking” was at first dazzling, an overwhelming variety of species all clamouring for attention. Steve taught us to identify our first edible plant of the day, wild onion (Allium vineale), promising us that once we spotted it we would see them everywhere. He was right, of course. Impatiently at first, our gazes raked there grasses, looking for a plant that looked like... well grass. But not quite grass, for look closer and you will notice that the stem is round rather than flat like the grass stems surrounding it, and then you spot the small beacon of the reddish flower bud. In a few weeks time, Steve tells us, this will bloom into the familiar allium pompom flowerhead. One after another there were cries of “there’s one!” and genuine excitement in our voices.

From onions we moved to munch on ox-eye daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare) which tastes like cucumber, and then to common sorrel (Rumex acetosa), which I had never tasted before and wow!, the lemony tart flavour was like munching on Bramley apple peelings. We learnt about plantain both broadleaf and ribwort, useful for treating bites and stings. Plantago major and lanceolata respectively. Finally my atypical state school Latin education is coming in handy! Into the woods and more plants to learn, and magical mushrooms to find (that serve as fire lighters rather than anything more mind-bending). As the morning progressed I found myself thinking deeply about how we humans learn, and all the different ways of doing that. My Early Years degree theorists scratched at my consciousness and reminded me of Bruner and his spiral curriculum. More to think on, more to write, such abundance in the world.

The photo shows an ornamental allium in my back garden, I think the species is Star of Persia (Allium cristophii). I am spending the bank holiday like most city dwellers, trying to keep cool. This week I read Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis and I'm listening to a book group choice on Audible, a novel called Bad Habit by Alana Portero. All that real life grittiness has lead me to order Eve Garnett's Family from One End Street from the library.