Beltaine is a Celtic Festival of Fire and Maypole dancing for the Merry Month of May.

 And so we celebrated Beltaine 2021 on the Friday night of April 30th, which was considered the Night of Beltaine when our ancestors considered that a day began at dusk. Of course, we our celebration was Covid-restricted: only 6 people allowed to meet, and no travel allowed after 7pm. So our friends Mikael Morice and Sylvie Le Moel welcomed us to their home, where they built a maypole for six ribbons, and fire to warm six people: who drank Beltaine champagne and ate Beltaine oysters. Yummy. 

I wore the kilt, but our dancing was limited to skipping around the Maypole and wrapping it in coloured ribbons. When pandemic restrictions ease, we hope to use it for children's entertainment and education.

Beltaine is one of the great Celtic events - taken over by the Catholic Church in Germany as Sankt Walpurgisnacht:  the nun St Walpurga was born in Devon, and she carried her English version of the gospel to convert Germanic heathens. No one in England has ever heard of her!  In France, the cleansing fires of Beltaine became the Feast of St Jean (John) on June 24th. We can still celebrate the Start of the Season of Light, the end of the 40 days of Nauruz (the Persian New Year that our Indo-European ancestors celebrated, starting with the Spring Equinox on March 21st). And so we did. 

We danced, we read poetry, we heard music (notably Gounod's "Faust") and we ate good food, washed down with a magnum of rosé wine. We would have wanted this to be a celebration for the Jumelage, the Town Twinning between Pordic, our Breton village, and the Cornish town of Hayle which we cannot visit because of the pandemic..... and we could not celebrate with the 40-odd French members of the Pordic-Hayle Jumelage. We celebrated with the president, our friend Claudine Mizzon, vice-president (my wife Michelle) and with our hosts who are also Jumelage Board Members. With their talented 15-year-old son Pierre. So I wish everyone a very joyful Merry Month of May. And next year maybe we can celebrate Beltaine like this, with 100 people.

 

Here are Breton Druids celebrating BENTAINE and the Season of Light 

deep in the Forêt de Brocéliande, a place that is filled with Arthurian legends
 

 Happy New Year  -  Bonne Année 2021 - aw sanbé sanbé  -  Frohes neues Jahr  - Bloavez Mad! 

Would you believe that?  My New Year gift (actually Xmas) is a TREADMILL. In British and American history, the treadmill's miserable history illustrates the awfulness of English values.

In 1817, millwright/engineer William Cubitt saw prisoners sitting idle. Instead of training or useful work,  he invented the tread-mill to “reform offenders by teaching them habits of industry.” 19th-century penal treadmills were wide wheels fitted with steps. Prisoners sentenced to “hard labour” would climb the steps repeatedly, causing the entire wheel to rotate. The penal treadmill was “the perfect punishment” by Victorian standards: useless but exhausting task that fitted with Victorian ideals about atonement achieved through hard work. Merciless hard work. The "Workhouses" used them as well, creating "work" for the "idle poor" ..... never wondering whether the wealthy were responsible for their poverty, the misery of rickets, the brutality of child labor. Some treadmills were used to grind corn. Others were simply a waking, walking hell. I once tried it in a museum. It was horrible.

Oscar Wilde walked a treadmill in Pentonville Prison as part of his 1895 hard labour sentence and it almost killed him. He left prison in 1897 and died just two years later, aged 46. The Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline called them a “preventative punishment” .... the priggish rich thought that no-one who experienced the treadmill would ever want to commit another crime. If they did - like stealing a loaf of bread to feed starving infants - then they were transported to Georgia or to Australia.

The ghastly penal treadmills were abolished in Britain in 1902. 

 And now I have bought a treadmill.  I prefer to call it a "skiing machine" but "a rose by any other name doth smell as sweet" write Shakespeare.

My wife thinks walking a treadmill will "serve me right" .... and if I a am able to lose some of my 'Covid Bonus' of 10 pounds, then she will be proved correct!  My kilt will tell me, whenever I am able to dance. SO LET US PRAY: for dancing and for losing some of those pounds.