Lighting up
Jeremy Clarke
What a depressingly sunless month January was, here on this rainswept Devon peninsula! No sun, and purple sprouting broccoli for lunch every day as there’s a glut of it and not much else. The entire village is suffering from seasonal affective disorder and tortured by flatulence. And we’ve still got February and possibly March to go before we can even think about casting a clout.
On Saturday, though, this interminable succession of dark days was punctuated by a Christian festival; 2 February was Candlemas Day, when candles are lit in the Anglican, Catholic and Greek churches to commemorate the 40th day after the Nativity, when Mary went to the Temple to be ceremonially purified.
The law given unto Moses states that after giving birth a woman is unclean for seven days. On the eighth day the child, if male, must be circumcised. After that the woman must wait another 33 days and then be ceremonially purified by the sacrifice of a lamb and a dove. If she had a baby girl she must wait 66 days. The lighted candles of Candlemas symbolise Simeon’s prediction, as he took Mary’s babe in his arms, that the child would be ‘a light to lighten the Gentiles’.
In the gents’ lavatory at my local pub, above the light switch, some wag has written the words ‘a light to lighten the genitals’ in black felt-tip pen. So at least one person who frequents the place is familiar enough with the verse in Luke’s gospel to try to make a pun out of it. But most other people, I suspect, assume that it’s just another health and safety notice.
But who am I to sneer at other people’s ignorance, when I only found out about Candlemas by coming across an Anglican website by accident on the morning of the day itself? The website was very informative. It said that the festival is actually superimposed on an even older pagan fire festival called Imbolc. At this stage of the winter, halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, people used to build great bonfires to draw down from heaven the divine energy of the sun. How the early Church fathers managed to persuade these dutiful pagans to exchange their huge midwinter sun-worshipping bonfires for a lighted candle commemorating the arcane purification ritual of an obscure Semitic tribe, I’ll never understand.
The spirit of the Imbolc bonfires lingers on, however, in the superstition that if, on Candlemas Day, the sun shines strongly enough for an animal to see its own shadow, then it’s going to be a long hard winter. If the weather is overcast and wet, on the other hand, the worst of the winter is already past. The Scottish version of the rhyme puts it like this:
If Candlemas Day be dry and fair The half o’ winter’s to come and mair. If Candlemas Day be wet and foul The half of winter’s gan at Yule.
After learning all this from the website, I went to the window and looked out. Black clouds, drizzle, gloom. Excellent. If the elements could keep the miserable weather going for a few more hours, spring and its rejuvenating sunshine will be just around the corner. I lit a candle, hoping it would help, then I informed my family about winter hanging in the balance. If the sun doesn’t come out between now and nightfall, I confidently told them, winter’s over. ‘What if it does?’ said my brother’s eldest lad, who is going in for the 11-plus. ‘I’m leaving the country,’ I said.
After lunch (more purple sprouting broccoli), my brother and I took his geriatric Border terrier for a walk along the beach. My brother is a policeman. He needed a spell of fresh air after reading in the newspaper that Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is about to receive extra round-the-clock protection costing £900,000 a year. He’s a disillusioned policeman at the moment. His 1.9 per cent pay increase is one reason. The whistleblower culture that exists within the police force is another. He says he sometimes finds himself in the absurd situation where he’s sitting in a minibus full of policemen outside a football ground, say, and they’re on crowd-control duty, and everyone in the bus is so nervous about accidentally letting slip something that could possibly be construed by a whistleblower as a racist remark that no one dares speak.
The sun was shining, I noticed. Moreover, it was casting a shadow of my brother’s Border terrier on to the pebbles. We commanded George not to look at his shadow, but it was too late. And then the clouds complaisantly parted and the damned sun stayed out for the rest of a glorious afternoon. The half o’ winter’s to come and mair, I’m afraid.
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