Hard Pressed

Apple Day is a strange recent phenomenon. A sort of post-modern ancient rite; part secular harvest festival, part produce show, a dash of bacchanal, a hint of music festival and an echo of village fete. There is some mystic, race-memory, time-warp quality associated with apples in the British psyche

We brought our offerings to the display of varieties - labels like incantations: I'm sure I saw Nunc Dimittis and Song of Solomon. I became apple-peeler in chief, with an arcane device in the mode of Heath-Robinson that peels, cores and slices in a single operation, driven by the winding of a handle. The apple flesh is left cut into a helix which, like staircases, everyone calls a spiral. There is a lot of stickiness and mopping up involved but, even then, a certain sense of ritual and sharing in the common feast

Elsewhere, there was labouring over huge bags of fruit, scratters and presses, bottles and flaggons. The whiff of the common labour of a medieval harvest hung in the air. Other folk offered (apple) cakes and ale and food cooked in the open air. A guitar and an old song. Children ran free and wild

On a bright, crisp autumn day, for a few hours, we forgot toxic politics, biosphere breakdown, looming cold, darkness and anxiety

For a few hours