I Saw Some Grass Growing through the Pavements Today

[steepholm]

I'm off to Japan on Wednesday. It will of course be just too late for Golden Week, which was deliberate on my part (since the trains and hotels are crowded then), but one day I'd like to see the carp streamers of children's day. That happens on 5th May, in other words today.

Instead, I enjoyed the sudden summer here in Bristol. I've been playing the field with cafés lately, and today (the weather being fine) my steps were naturally drawn down to the City Farm Café in St Werburghs, ten minutes' walk down the path from my house. Not only do you get to eat in the company of Jacobs sheep, etc., but you can do it from the comfort of the bole of an enchanted tree.



In the afternoon, the mixing of the rural with the urban continued in the form of Bristol's Jack-in-the-Green, who wove his way through the city followed by his acolytes, welcoming in the summer. In this video, he and his entourage are making their way up the Gloucester Rd., while I stand near a bus stop. Who needs the greenwood, after all? And as for matsuri, we have our own. Click to watch.

Comments

[cmcmck]

Only the second St Werburgh's I've come across. There is the village of Hoo St Werburgh near where I grew up.

While Rochester has Jack in the Green at May time for the Sweeps' Festival.

[steepholm]

Yes, St Werburgh's does seem to be a rare one. St Werburgh herself had no connection with Bristol, as far as I'm aware.

[larryhammer]

Excellent Tull reference.

I remember Children's Day. There were carp streamers above the jungle gym at my kindergarten and I didn't know what they were about, and the explanation I got was apparently in Japanese because I couldn't remember it after I returned to America and forgot my Japanese. (At four, I was child-fluent in both languages but couldn't translate between them, so conversations in one were 'inaccessible' in the other.) Didn't figure out what the streamers were for again till I was an adult.

[steepholm]

I have a very vivid image - perhaps from a dream - of carp streamers blowing out over water, against a sharp blue sky, and the wind whipping their tails. I'd love to see them in reality.