Will Chippy be resurrected like the Saracen?  

Just back from the celebration of 400 years since the Chipping
Norton Town Charter here in the UK, where we are ruled by
unpleasant paranoid Scotsmen just as we were 400 years ago after
the unification of the Anglo Scottish crowns.

Picture my 12 year old son Caleb and I amidst a crowd of mostly older
people, all decked out in the best finery of the early seventeenth
century; the aldermen with their ceremonial chains of office strung
over fur trimmed robes, the ladies in bonnets reminiscent of movies
about the pilgrim fathers sailing to America. One tall and proud
young woman sported a babe held high in arms and a pillbox hat. Others could  almost have been Falstaff. But though we are pretty close to Stratford there was no one at all closely resembling the bard on this his official birthday.  (Well, no, not me; I may be a poet, but I am not in that league.) There were lacy collars though.

By the time we tumbled out of the town hall Caleb felt disoriented, as
if he had just leaped four centuries. Maybe he should not have
sampled the beer.

After a week of family disasters neither of us had managed to organise any kind  of costume, though my shaggy sheep coloured fleece looks peasanty enough. But we could certainly join in the merry making, eating all sorts of interesting free food that we hoped was ancient in recipe rather than preparation, and drinking beer specially brewed by Hook Norton brewery for the occasion.

St George, the national hero, suddenly thrust himself into the proceedings in the strange shapes of a group of mummers. We watched a medieval pace-egging play about his battle with the Saracen, which must date from the crusaders returning.  After the battle, the Saracen's mother arrives on the field, appealing for a doctor to return her son to life. This doctor duly appears and performs the feat.

Chipping Norton was damaged if not killed off as a wool town by its
lack of a good mill stream. Water power took mechanised cloth
production elsewhere, for ours is the highest town in the Cotswolds
at 700 feet, so we have nothing but a small stream originating here.

The modern town has also been affected by the closure of
its furniture factory, now becoming a site for new Wimpey homes, I believe.

Will Chippy be resurrected like the Saracen?  Who knows?

Yesterday, the town's magnificent Youth Theatre gave us "Unlawful
assembly" a modern/medieval promenading theatre performance about the progress of love. There is no explanation for it being unlawful, yet
any sort of non New Labour assembly may soon become a target for our tyrant, "President" Blair, whose assumption of Police State powers
begins to rival the medieval monarch of Nepal. An ASBO for Harlequin perhaps?

It seems even the BBC's “Top Of The Pops” falls foul of new licensing laws.


Will St George come to the rescue in the form of the new conservative
party leader and our local Member of Parliament, David Cameron? I doubt it very much. Cameron’s name sounds suspiciously Scottish to me. His greenness is of the real wood veneer variety.

Hope for all our future probably lies in a struggle with ourselves. For
the story of St George and the Saracen is really a common man’s
version of one of the great grail mysteries. St George was not a
Christian Knight but was himself a martyr from Turkey. In the Grail story it is Percival who fights with the Saracen and kills him, only to find he has unjustly killed his own better nature, which has to be revived.

The Saracen has marbled skin; he is a chimera. His being is a blend
of two womb twins. He has integrated his shadow self rather than projecting it onto Osama Bin Bush. You will find it all in Joseph Campbell's “Occidental Mythology, the masks of God”, if you like myths. For poetically minded folk, Ted Hughes describes the struggle in his own epic tale and prose poem, "Gaudete," published in 1977.

Let us not forget that we are also celebrating "Earth Day."

The modern pilgrim's challenge is not to reach Canterbury or Mecca,
but that inner place of truth where we can overcome our inner demons.
Only then can we successfully address the outer problem of changing our lives so we are not overwhelmed by global warming. If we fail on this road it will be because we were trapped in the young peoples beautifully described honey pot of "Trade" wars, taking where we need to give, where charity is corrupted to avarice, as we fight over dwindling oil and water resources, which will lead us all to destruction.

If we do not sort this stuff out then the water meters being installed in
all our houses here will just be the beginning of enforced and/or much
more  terrible changes to our freedom, dignity and well being.

Seizing Iraq's oil was not the answer. It was corrupt and greedy.

There may be no community left to celebrate another 400 years since the Town Charter was granted if we carry on in that way.


Nick Owen 
also to be found at:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/wychwood/