What have Sri Lanka and Lancashire got in common? Oktoberfest
I have attended three Oktoberfests in my life. Two were in Sri Lanka, the third, today, was in Lancashire.
There wasn't really much difference between the two versions. When you erect a large marquee, fill it with a few hundred people and give them leather trousers, accordian music and two-litre glasses of beer, it's amazing how the cultural differences slip away. In both in Sri Lanka and Lancashire the venues for Oktoberfest smelt authentically of roasted pig. In both Sri Lanka and Lancashire the playlist for the evening consisted of 'Country Roads' followed by 'Brown Eyed Girl' followed by Shania Twain. In both Sri Lanka and Lancashire people started the evening dancing on tables, and ended it falling off them. But Lancashire was unique in bringing in a German oom-pa-pa band to play such Anglo-Saxon favourites as 'Hitler has only got one ball,' 'Ere we go, Ere we go, Ere we go' and, my personal favourite, 'I've got a luverly bunch of coconuts.'
It was October 31st, Hallowe'en. The night when the living scare the dead back into the graves. If the looks of some of the people at Oktoberfest, the graveyards in Lancashire should be pretty quiet after tonight. There was a barperson of indeterminate gender wearing a dirndl, a lot of men wearing blond plaits and a woman who, with beery conviction, seemed sure that that her husbands was Patrick Swayze risen from the grave and accordingly threw herself at him men with gay and heavy abandon when the Dirty Dancing megamix hit the decks. Then there was Igor, the bone-crunching bouncer, who was called upon around 11pm when a brawl broke out. One of the many things I love about Lancashire is the gender equality that is in place when it comes to brawls. Here you can find women against women, women against men, or even a lucky dip. It's very twenty-first century.
Or is it? Is there something historical, genetic, about Lancashire women that makes them, well, a bit vicious? If you were around in 1612 you could have diverted yourself of an evening by reading 'The Wonderful Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster', a book by one Thomas Potts which recorded the trial and hanging of ten witches from Lancashire. The book had an easy ride onto the the bestsellers at the time, since England, compared to the rest of Europe which was ablaze with women roasting on stakes, was a relatively safe place to practise the dark arts with disappointignly few accounts of witch torture and murder. The trial of these Lancashire witches was an anomaly. And what made it and indeed makes it an interesting trial to this day, is that the women accused of complicity with the devil needed no prompting or torture to confess! They actually seemed to believe they were witches. One of them even added that the devil had sucked her blood and made her mad. Anyone watching 'True Blood' may have something to say about that.
I was in Lancaster, site of the witches trial and hanging, for the early stages of Hallowe'en. Lancaster is a city of tall, greystone buildings and hilly, narrow streets. From its tallest hill you can see the bleak brown Irish sea and the jagged mountains of the Lake District to the north. It is a city that wears its full moons well and whose trees seem happiest when their branches are bare and can wave their spindly arms and gnarled fingers gleefully in the cold black sky. It is a city of Guardian readers and vegetarians. It is very middle-class, very pretty and not really very scary. Hence I wasn't too worried to see teenage witches in miniskirts going from house to house for trick or treat. There were plenty of parents around anyway to stave off predators, accompanying two foot tall draculas and lots of small female fairies. As with Oktoberfest, this was a safe risk. There would be no murders or blood-sucking or hangings tonight.
And yet I come to Lancaster every week to volunteer at a charity that deals with abuse and even murders of children accused of being witches in Nigeria. There, now, as in England in the 17th century, these beliefs are linked to Christianity, but also to a dangerously unsettled society that has undergone dramatic changes within the shape of a few generations, changes that can shake belief systems and leave communities prone to violence and mistrust.
It is late. Past the witching hour and I am awake writing this. An owl is calling outside. I drove home from Oktoberfest with my car window open to the cold, squinting at the yellow smears from the odd street lamp scattered beside the country roads, their bulbs like cats eyes against the sky. This time last year as I was leaving Oktoberfest at the five star Hilton hotel in Colombo, Sri Lanka, I stopped for a moment by the five star hotel pool, drawn in by the tiny lights that winked up at me from beneath the still, inky water. My eyes lifted from the pool to the glinting galaxy above and I basked in the warmth of stargazing in the southern hemisphere. Between me and the Oktoberfest marquee were trees resplendent with waxy green leaves. The sounds of the oom-pa-pa band I'd left behind filtered through the foilage, reaching me as a dull thud, it could have been the coded message from another country, another planet. It was time to leave and go to sleep, the next day was a working day and after work there would be more lime juices to be drunk, more trips to the beach to be planned, more reports of war. But still, there was that sky, that moment's pause -
Before winter, perhaps, before evil slips into less recognisible guises and we lock ourselves up in our houses and forget that we ever once laughed and drank and danced in the face of the oncoming dark.
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