For Competition 3404 you were invited to design your own Midsummer rites. There were fewer entries than usual, all of them very good. I was sorry not to have room for Mark Ambrose’s ritual involving a small white ball (‘Eighteen is the sacred number. We assemble before dawn and climb the hill to a wooded glade’). Other runners-up: Tracy Davidson, Paul Freeman, Sue Pickard, George Simmers, Bill Greenwell and Joseph Houlihan. The £25 vouchers go to the following.
Midsummer Saturday at Frizinghall begins early with the ritual of Waking the Sleepers, in which locals salute the rising sun with power tools, mowers, car alarms and pressure washers. Next comes the Goose Game, in which drivers jostle each other in gaggles at every road junction, honking madly and adopting bizarre, gaping expressions. Obscenities are shouted in order to ‘clear the air’. After a loud display by local police vehicles, intended to drive away evil spirits, votive bonfires are lit in many back gardens, on which scraps of meat, fat and bone are incinerated. Pungent, greasy smoke ascends to the Aestival Spirits, while devotees gnaw the charred/bloody residues and pour out libations of warm fizzy wine. The festivities end with the ceremony of Burning the Taxes, in which elderly pop stars thump and shout at children and their parents at the municipal park, until the stars come out.
Frank Upton
We’ll gather round the table laid
With Pimm’s, fruit punch and beer,
We’ll dance around the lemonade
And sip the sweet sangria.
We’ll daub ourselves with sticky treats,
With sauce and honey glaze,
A bacchanal of juicy meats,
The tastes of summer days!
We’ll gorge on strawberries and cream:
A feast for all the senses –
A veritable vespine dream!
The ritual commences:
Those frantic, flapping Kate Bush arms,
The scents of spheksophobia;
Abuzz, we’ll weave our waspish charms –
Hymenopteran utopia.
David Silverman
A Scottish midsummer’s day ritual. The celebrations begin at dawn, when the first rays of the sun touch your nearest standing stone. Scotland has many suitable standing stones, mostly in open fields, so the rays are bound to strike it somewhere. Any ritual is acceptable if sufficiently obscure, and as long as it does not involve the sacrifice of a nubile virgin, which is currently frowned upon and difficult to organise. There are, however, drawbacks. Sunrise is very early, so starting in the pub the night before is recommended. Secondly, midsummer is traditionally overcast with heavy showers. This requires an almanac and a chronometer, while the robes (traditional 18th-century imaginary druid) should include a large waterproof hat. At the time at which the rays would strike the stone if there were any and could be seen through the rain, the traditional ancient words are chanted: ‘Pluit, pluit, cur semper pluit?’
Brian Murdoch
For a perfick midsummer lark, pack a picnic hamper with The Darling Buds of May and Jilly Cooperbooks, a vat of elderflower wine, champagne, jugs of real Jersey cream, cold roast goose, a whole ham and raspberry and chocolate super-bumper icecreams. Convey by vintage Rolls-Royce to the nearest bluebell wood. Drench self in Chanel No. 5.Frolic amongst buttercups and daisies, clothing optional. Recite Keats. Drink several brandies. Pick strawberries in your lingerie. Listen to cuckoos and nightingales going hell for leather. Laugh like a jelly. Seduce a taxman or vicar in a buttercup meadow. Know your technique. Dive into a swimming pool. Host a gymkhana. Drink four Chauffeur cocktails. Plan holidays in France. Find a Rosie to drink cider with under a hay wagon. Sunbathe on sand dunes. Gaze at the young, unquenchable summer stars. Make mead. To complete rites, set off fireworks. All very wurf while.
Janine Beacham
Were you to go, at scorch of noon Midsummer Day, up Hagglestock Hill, you would see me, lobster red, half-naked from an already blistering heat, satanically slaughtering whatever yokel, dame-school delinquent or (in a bad year) purloined sheep I had persuaded to join me on the false pretext of collecting yarrow. Severed from my coven by schism – they cleave timorously to the cover of small hours and December gales – I choose to taunt God in the face of His Creation’s brightest, most beauteous beneficences. As the latest head (wench, goat) rolls, disgorging blasphemous crimson to discolour lush emerald grasses, God’s solar eye sees, condescending to His customary inaction. My interventionist Master, however, to the grovelling cackle of my sunstroke-addled incantations, speeds a corruption of the sacrificed flesh never observable in the chill of the winter solstices of my former brethren. Vindicated, I vacate the Hill until next year.
Adrian Fry
Come midsummer’s day down in Somerset
When ’tis pouring cats and dogs,
And the willow tree branches are dripping wet
And meadows turn soggy as bogs,
We’ll don our wellies, go out on the levels
And dancing about like demented devils,
We’ll rollick and romp in our midsummer revels
Bedecked in our tatty old togs.
Let others have bonfires, flowers and feasts
With the usual hullabaloo,
We’d sooner be prancing about like beasts
Concocting a ritual that’s new.
In a dance macabre that’s demonic and dire
All wallowing knee-deep in slurry and mire
And hollering like hoodlums whose heads are on fire
Come summer is what we shall do.
Alan Millard
No. 3407: Between the lines
In a recent talk about libel, the Private Eye editor mentioned by way of example that as code for ‘a massive crook’ they might put ‘a well-known northern businessman’. You’re invited to write euphemistically about a historical event (150 words max). Please email entries to competition@spectator.co.uk by 2 July.
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