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For bank holiday weekend fun, why not head over to the village of Burrough Green in Cambridgeshire, where, according to the Paranormal Database, on this night every year the two statues that stand above the door of the school come alive and dance on the village green. Should definitely be worth seeing.
Inspired by the recent enforced quiet in Britain caused by the volcanic ash, I have come up with a suggestion. One day a year when the whole world switches off its phone and lounges quietly in a deckchair at home. No planes, no cars, no DIY. Lazy people manage this quite well already, but their fun is always spoilt by busy types, banging or sawing or travelling about even when they don't have to.
Allowable noise: birdsong, children playing (within reason), tea-sipping, page-rustling, bees buzzing (no wasps), cork-popping, chuckling at a remembered joke. No loud snoring, keyboard-tapping or annoying conversation - preferably no speech at all, apart from a whispered 'thank you' if someone hands you a piece of cake.
We'll all be better for it, I promise. I suggest July 12, the birthday of Henry David Thoreau, a master of peaceful living. Let the preparations begin!
"The pure nonsense they invented was a holiday of the mind; one of the few things, like Gothic architecture, that had really never been done before. It was something to create a happy nightmare; it was something more to create a thing that was at once lawless and innocent... It was the avowal of a sport or enjoyment to which the whole mind of the people must already have been tending. The Victorian Englishman walked the world in broad daylight, a proverbially solid figure, with his chimney pot hat and his mutton-chop whiskers. But something happened to him at night; some wind of nightmare blowing through his soul and his subconsciousness dragged him out of bed and whirled him out of the window, where he rose into a world of wind and moonshine... with his whiskers waving like wings." GK Chesterton on Carroll and Lear
The Lambeth Landmark site is full of images from an amazingly pastoral Brixton, like this farm on Coldharbour Lane, above.
The cornfields are sadly vanished from Brixton Hill, although the windmill is still there.
Some of them, like these cattle on the corner of Clapham Park Road, or the sheep grazing in Brockwell Park, really don't seem that long ago.
Brixton also has a long tradition of theatrical/strange modes of transport: until recently a bright pink tank often used to drive up and down Brixton Road (what happened to that?) and a very striking man with long dreadlocks occasionally rides a white carthorse bareback past my house. But that was nothing compared with music-hall artist Mr Gustav-Grais's zebra chaise, stabled in Brixton in 1912.
