There is something quintessentially darling, and completely bonkers, about life in the countryside. I’m thinking, in particular, about the variety of entertainment laid on by villagers in the name of a festival. Honestly, you would think they didn’t have 274 television channels plus movies on demand down there in the terraces.
Let me give you an example. Here in Millthwaite, the villagers applaud the lies told by a daring (dare I say criminal) smuggler to a dastardly excise officer: when caught in the act of trying to fish barrels of smuggled booze from the canal, our intrepid hero told the excise officer that he was trying to rescue the moon that had fallen in.
This implausible explanation was accepted by the excise officer who took our hero for a drunken simpleton and let him go.
In celebration, a paper lantern moon is bobbed down the canal, then fished out and marched around the village to the beat of a band. Lunacy! Did you see what I did there my dears? Luna-cy? Oh I do tickle myself sometimes.
It makes you wonder why other incidents of tax fraud aren’t commemorated in a similar fashion. Perhaps we should all dress up as our favourite Nicholas Cage characters to celebrate the actions that led to his Las Vegas mansion being confiscated by the taxman or we could build a giant effigy of Kerry Katona to carry around on our shoulders – we would need to model said effigy on one of her skinnier phases obviously to avoid shoulder strain or wax shortages.
The villagers join in the fun by making their own paper lanterns to a theme chosen by the organisers. Last year the theme was time and so there were many clocks, hour glasses and tardises? Or should it be tardai? Rather disconcertingly, there were also a large number of grandfather clocks, which, with their stocky bases, long shafts and rounded clock faces looked a lot like illuminated…. Well darlings, I’ll leave it to your imaginations.
No I won’t. Willies! They looked like willies.
Anyway, it was all jolly good fun. It put one in the mood for more festivals.
Fortunately, our neighbours in the next village are planning a party of their own to celebrate the occasion on which their predecessors failed in an attempt to trap a budgerigar by holding it in a cage with no lid. I ask you. Where else is such incompetence worth of annual reminder? Office Christmas parties aside.
Oh wait, I forgot Guy Fawkes’ night. And Big Brother. Perhaps this folly isn’t purely the preserve of villagers after all. Party on darlings. Party on.