CR5 Issue 154 March 2018 digital

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Mad As A March Hare The phrase ‘Mad as a March Hare’ has been around since at least 1500 (that’s the year, not 3pm in real money) and makesreference to the odd behaviour that the creature exhibits when the hare’s breeding season starts. Jumping up and down for no apparent reason, and boxing other hares, are amongst a range of generally odd behaviours that have marked the hare out as a bit weird for at least one brief period each year. Of course, the appearance of the Mad Hatter’s completely barking companion the March Hare in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ did much to popularise the whole thing. But March, and the onset (hopefully) of Spring, sees a whole wealth of saintly oddities emerge, some of which make the hare look positively sensible. March 1st is St David’s day, the patron saint of Wales. Little is known about him but we can be fairly certain that he didn’t wear a leek, as became popular for the Welsh to do on the day in the centuries to follow. Another popular March 1st activity, at least in England, was hanging a Welshman, albeit in effigy form. Some used dolls, again with leeks stuck in their hats, and later on, bakers would sell gingerbread figures, called Taffies, on skewers for people to buy and presumably dangle from a piece of string before eating them. My, what fun! St Piran’s day is on the fifth, and if we know little about David, we know even less about Piran. He was probably Irish and died in Cornwall, and that was enough for the tin-miners of that county to claim him as their patron saint. They regularly took the day off in honour of the presumably holy man, and although there may have been many ways in which he was celebrated, the only one that has been recorded in any detail was their determination to get very drunk. Pope Gregory’s day is the 12th March. He may have been made a saint, but no-one seems to have cared enough to put together a decent bunch of odd traditions. But regardless, one grew up in a seemingly unrelated way. In Lancashire at least, the 12th became ‘Gregory Great Onion’, celebrating the fact that if you wanted a really great crop of onions you needed to plant the seeds that day. Obviously. And if you think that’s clearly a whacky medieval belief, think again. The practice was recorded as happening in the late 1930s. To be sure now, if it isn’t St Patrick’s Day on the 17th. The patron saint of Ireland is celebrated enthusiastically across the world by anyone and everyone who has even the remotest connection with the emerald isle. Saw Riverdance once? That’s good enough. From New York to New Delhi, in every Irish theme pub, the globe and occasionally even the Guinness turns green and sprouts shamrocks. Now England may be joining in with this world party in recent years, but the simmering resentment between the two island races used to mean that the wearing of shamrocks or harps in celebration of the day was more likely to result in friction and fighting rather than fun. The Craic was a lot harder to come by in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Which goes to show that however crazy the natural world gets, man can always get crazier… Paul M Ford writes for GrayDorian – The Writing Bureau 82 Log into www.cr5.co.uk your local community website!
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