Given that our May meeting falls on May Day itself, I’ll be offering a talk entitled Oss! Oss! Wee Oss!, a brief look at the extraordinary May Day celebrations in Padstow, Cornwall, which I have witnessed myself. It’s old, complicated, with various mumming characters, and the whole town gets involved, dividing into two teams, each following a different ‘Obby ‘Oss. There are a number of songs, which are sung pretty much for days and it seems that everyone in the town can play the accordion or the drums. The effect is a combination of heart-warming community spirit and an uncanny sense of something big and ancient from which no one is free to diverge. It won’t surprise you to hear that these festivities were the inspiration for the 1973 folk horror movie The Wicker Man.

(I had hoped that, as a sort of double A-side, we’d be visited by Australian member Stewart Stirling, to fill us in about life down under and the challenges of pursuing a Chappist agenda there. However, it turns out that on this date he’ll be in Scotland as part of his Grand Tour of the UK.)

As usual we will be attempting to live-stream the proceedings, very much at the mercy of the pub’s wifi. The link to watch that is https://youtube.com/live/o5hKeRBystc.