TWELFTH NIGHT CALCULATIONS

This morning I was listening idly to the ‘Today’ programme on Radio 4 while munching away on my buttered toast, when someone, whose name I didn’t catch, came on to say that he had written a new batch of Winnie-the-Pooh stories that would be published in the autumn under the title of ‘Return to the Hundred Acre Wood.’

He then read a charming extract with Pooh saying though he had been absent for 80 years, ‘years’ were only a unit of time and it might just as well have been 80 weeks or even 80 minutes, in which later case it might just be time for a little smackerel of something in the Hundred Acre Wood.

I know shall look forward to the publication but I fear I shall be disappointed. These sequels, even if the characters are revived by the original author, never quite seem to hit the mark. Time moves on, whatever Pooh may say, in the enchanted - as well as enchanting - Hundred Acre Wood. All of which made me ask myself how big anyway was 100 acres? And spent some minutes working this out to be about a mile by 300 yards.

In idle moments I am always essaying these kinds of calculations. Last week I wrote about Jane Shilling’s memoir of learning to ride, buying a horse and then joining the local hunt - ‘A Fox in the Cupboard.’ Walking through our own very much less than 100 acre wood the next day I found myself reckoning what it all must have cost and why, as a single mum she should have incurred such great expense while still (I assume) a relatively lowly paid sub-editor. Even when she became a regular columnist and reviewer the charge of this equestrian activity on the Shilling household must have been a heavy one.

She says her horse cost £3,200. But then there’s the livery, the vet’s and farrier’s bills, hunt subscriptions, transport, both for the horse to meets, and for herself to and fro from London to deepest Kent. There is proper clothing to be bought, and riding boots, and general impedimenta; there is insurance (sure to be crippling when you think of what a horse can do with a well-aimed kick). Why when a frequent theme of her articles used to be the frugality of her existence did she embark on such a financially threatening course?

This is indeed a more interesting question and I think the answer has something to do with tribe. We all have an atavistic urge to belong to and to be accepted by a wider group of people, not necessarily that we like, but with whom we have a common purpose and who will support us if need be. Jane’s book ends like this:

“I turned and looked back on them all - the Ashford Valley, eating and drinking and flirting on Midsummer’s eve. It was dark on the road where the trees hung down and I couldn’t see their faces, only their silhouettes, but as I paused there for a moment, poised just outside the circle of light and celebration, someone waved. They’d noticed that I had gone.”

This seems her acknowledgment that at last she felt accepted into the Ashford Valley tribe, whereas before she felt an outsider.

Our tribes are distinguished by traditions, by modes of dress, by colours and by purpose. The activity that the tribes engage in, sport, riding, party politics, acting, is often incidental to the real purpose: the satisfaction that we get from belonging, from knowing the jargon and the in-jokes, the history, the anecdotes, the common language and the chance to live in a smaller, friendlier world. Though in reality a tribe’s internal politics rarely run smooth.



My own tribe is acting and we are often at cross-purposes. We cannot even agree when to hold our traditional Twelfth Night revels. Should it be the 5th or the 6th of January? It is our version of Lilliput’s Big and Little Enders.

I suppose it all depends when you start counting. Night one ought to be Christmas Eve - when, one presumes, the shepherds came down from the hills. By the time the Magi arrived on Christmas morning the messy bits were safely over and the Babe, all washed and wrapped lay smiling happily in His manger.

Incidentally, this is always depicted as a kind of trough on legs which any self-respecting ungulate would kick over before you could say Santa Claus. Real mangers are fixed to the wall at the height of a horse’s head, which would be a more sensible place to put a baby in an occupied stable. Twelfth Night would then become the 4 January. Oh dear!

Still, if like Pooh Bear you are not a slave to literalism and think the quantum of time units immaterial to a good story, then it really matters not. Besides 6 January is the feast of St Stephen (when the snow lay round about) and St Stephen has traditionally been as much a part of the end of Christmas as St Nicholas has been a part of the beginning.

So, pace modernists everywhere, I stuck to the traditional night. A great party ensued. Before midnight we commenced removing the Christmas decor, ready for the barren abstinence that stretches out deep, cold and boringly even towards Lent. Which, in these ever more troubled times, looks as though it will well live up to its name as the season of borrowing.