The Pie At Night: In Search of the North at Play by Stuart Maconie

Author:Stuart Maconie [Maconie, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409033240
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2015-09-09T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

MAKING A DAY OF IT

Bank holidays in Silloth and Southport and a trip to see the ‘Lights’

Only virgins and generals keep diaries, they say. Samuel Pepys, Adrian Mole, Alan Bennett, Michael Palin, Bridget Jones and other diarists of note notwithstanding, that may still be true. But everyone used to have one, if not keep it. Nowadays, when the future is swiped into view with a finger, giving a child a ‘day to day diary’ for Christmas would maybe seem a little weird, like buying them a cummerbund or purchase ledger or a book of log tables; an oddly adult, formal gift, a queer relic of an era before phones were smarter than their owners.

Back in the days before Apps and Apple, schoolkids even had their own diaries, little leatherette volumes in burgundy or green, crammed with stuff which the stern implication was would surely come in handy one day though it never did: avoirdupois and troy weights and the differing grains thereof, chains and furlongs, pecks and bushels, nautical miles and the Beaufort scale. Its tiny printed pages told you that today was the second Sunday after Septuagesima, whatever that was, and how many more weeks of Advent and Lent, or more importantly chocolate and no chocolate, there were.

To a child these markings meant little. But once they had been signposts to navigate the year by. Before electric light and fridges and central heating tamed the seasons, smoothed out the jagged edges and rising ridges of passing time, this was how we charted our progress round the sun and round the working year, from pole to festive pole. Wakes and Whitsuntide, Candlemas and Michaelmas; a kid nowadays would probably assume that they were minor characters from Game of Thrones rather than old red letter days. In Macclesfield, they have their own special holiday for the silk workers called, fabulously, Barnaby.

High days and holidays; even in our sleepless 24/7 world, we still keep them though we give them different names. What my mum calls Whit Monday is now Spring Bank Holiday but the meaning holds. It’s a day away from the normal round, one of those six times a year Blur identified that we refuse to let the toad Work squat on our lives. The need for days like this, days when we lie in, kick back, slope off, dress up, have fun, can be seen in the enthusiasm with which we cultivate and embrace new ones; Halloween and trick or treat, Valentine’s and Mother’s Day, Red Nose Day, Pudsey, Wogan and baths of beans. What is the fuss about Transfer Deadline Day by Sky Sports if not the childish need for special days dressed up as news?

For working people, precious days of paid holiday were rare, hard won and to be celebrated fiercely and without restraint. Leisure in the pre-industrial world is sometimes rather rosily seen as an idyllic sunlit parade of maypole dancing, cider quaffing, Morris dancing and cricket on the village green in a Merrie England theme park, a Pop Larkin vision of rural life as full of plump, buxom and bucolic pleasure.

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