Tuesday 30th September, 2003 – Harvest Festival

Fortunately / unfortunately, last weekend’s solemn, gerbil-related visit to Jane’s family in Devon also coincided with the Sowton Village Harvest Dinner. This is the kind of quaint, rural get-together that I knew nothing of growing up in Birmingham. It involves some kind of arcane West Country ritual, whereby people who live close to one another leave their houses, go to the same place, and actually speak to each other (as opposed to suburban tradition of snatching glances at your neighbours from behind twitching curtains, pretending not to notice one another at the supermarket, and enduring excruciatingly awkward chit-chat if you should happen to walk out to your cars for work in the morning at the same time).

Despite my trepidation, and expecting some kind of hideous, breast-baring, Wicker Man-style pagan sacrament, I agreed to join Jane and her family at this ‘dinner’. Early signs were positive, as we entered a cold, high-ceilinged, converted barn, to be greeted with smiles and warm greetings from a large-bosomed lady, and a jug-eared man who talked to me about football.

Sowton Village has a population of less than 100. And judging by the folk who filed into the hall over the next half hour, the average age of the population is not far off that mark. The people of Sowton doddered, tottered, and shuffled in, clutching their contributions to the raffle, the results of which were to be announced at the end of the evening. When I later went to inspect the prize table, I noticed that, amongst the bottles of cheap wine and Cadbury’s Roses, were a tin of Happy Shopper kidney beans, and a set of rawl plugs. With several rawl plugs removed.

Despite the unfamiliar surroundings, I began to relax a little. These people clearly bore me no ill will. And even if they did, I felt reasonably confident that I could take them out if it came down to a fist-fight. These were elderly folk – there were blue-rinses, floral dresses, wattle, and bingo-wings as far as the eye could see. Apart from Jane, her sister, and me the only person under 30 in the room was an 11 or 12 year-old boy clearly dressed in his best clothes, who spent the evening shrugging off his fussy mother’s attempts to straighten his collar, and staring disconsolately down at his Gameboy Advance.

There was a lady in her early 60s sitting on the table opposite me, who had luxurious red hair, a vibrant purple blouse, and a pearl necklace. She flounced and preened and swooshed, and was clearly the village glamour-puss (a bit like Onslow’s sister in Keeping Up Appearances, but not as sluttish). She seemed very friendly, but had worn a rather low top, which gaped at the front every time she leant forward, revealing her slightly wrinkly cleavage. As she rocked forward and back with exaggerated glamour-puss laughter, I found myself transfixed by the bobbing, wrinkly cleavage, winking at me intermittently. I realised how I would look to anyone watching me, and consciously snapped myself out of my strange cleavage reverie. But there was something eerie about the way it seemed to call to me. Not in a sexual way. It was actually a bit sinister. I half expected a nest of vipers to suddenly spring forth from her blouse, her rouged cheeks suddenly melting away to reveal a horrible, demented zombie-face.

This didn’t happen of course, but I was in a skittish mood.

To complete the cast of Heartbeat-style rural archetypes, there was even a village idiot. Well, this is one way of describing the gentleman in question, and perhaps needlessly cruel. I heard the term ‘not the full shilling’ used several times in reference to him. Others would probably describe him as being learning disabled. He didn’t have Down’s Syndrome or anything. He was just an exceptionally simple, ruddy-faced, smiley man in his late 40s, who still lived at home with his mum, and worked on the family farm, as he had done all his life.

But again, unlike other slightly slow men you might meet in our cities or towns, he had a particular rural twist to his character that made him both charming and unnerving (I’d recently watched Straw Dogs). He had a lolloping, fell-walking gait, and bright-red, cider-drinker’s cheeks. You could equally imagine him chasing you away from his worried cows with a pitchfork, or falling backwards of a stone wall with one of those clay scrumpy-pots in his hand. Only to pop up with his tweed cap skewiff, and with not one drop of booze spilt.

All the same, one glass of free wine, and a can of warm Heineken later, I was beginning to enjoy myself. My only regret was that I filled up too much on the main course of salad and sweaty meats to appreciate the delicious home-cooked deserts. But I never felt anything more than a tourist. I think I am too steeped in the suburban ways of default mistrust and contempt to appreciate the spectacle of community and neighbourliness that was on offer for anything more than its novelty value. Thus the rather snotty, stereotype-heavy report above.

It really was quite a heartwarming evening. There was a sense of community that I’d never experienced before. But the slightly pitiful thing is that, despite the wonderful hospitality, I’m not sure I necessarily want to experience it again.