Jack in the Green

Having blipped Barley Saturday and Walpurgis Night I couldn't let May Day pass without some sort of recognition.

We have none of the dawn festivity that takes place in Oxford (where it's traditional, among other things, for inebriated students to break their legs jumping into the river), nor is there any recognition locally that it is International Workers' Day, as for example there was in Preston this morning.

But out on my walk who should I meet but Jack in the Green peeping out of the ivy? He's the pagan force of nature, trickster and fertility symbol traditionally associated with the Beltane/May Day roistering and revelry that the Victorians sanitized into a much less bawdy festival.

International Workers' day commemorates the Haymarket Riot in Chicago on 4th May 1886 when police fired on strikers demanding an 8 hour working day, after a bomb was thrown. (Anarchists were blamed and four were hanged.) It's no coincidence that it's also May Day. In pre-industrial times this was the point in the agricultural year when, the animals having given birth and the crops being sown, there was a lull in the toil that gave workers the opportunity for an interval of recreation before the next set of chores in the farming calendar.

Jack in the Green will have vanished next time I pass by but there's a great song by Jethro Tull with which to remember him.