New boots and panties

Talk about chalk and cheese; we make an odd couple, the unerringly handsome María Inés de la Cruz and I. Whilst I loiter around La Villa Ramblanista in spandex trousers and a big, baggy t-shirt looking like a cross between Nena and Joey Tempest’s twin sister, she’s preening her thick black tresses and gazing at herself in the mirror, the spitting image of ... well, I’ll leave that to your imagination.

So you can imagine her surprise when I announced I was about to purchase a brand new pair of boots. And not just the cheap tat I usually buy; when I said I was forking out one hundred and ten of your English pounds she very nearly fainted. Then I said they were hiking boots; if looks could kill ...

Poor María, she never will understand. She’ll never understand the unrequited love a Ramblanista has for her hiking boots; she’ll never quite comprehend why I’m so reluctant to part with my now decrepit pair of Karrimor boots – seventy quid from Great Western Camping in Dorchester – that have been laced to my feet for more than a thousand of your English miles, along the Camino de Santiago and beyond. Listen, if she had her way they’d be out with the refuse, awaiting collection by the oxymoronically-titled Somerset Waste Partnership. 

The old boots - can you feel the love?

So I never let them out of my sight, not even now I have a go-faster pair of boots, purchased from the lovely shop assistant at Wells Outdoors – get yourself a website and start tweeting, Mr Wells Outdoors!

You know what they say about the sudden manifestation of children destroying an ideal relationship? We might say the same about my new boots. It didn’t help when I joked about wearing them in bed because the insufferably handsome María Inés de la Cruz knew perfectly well I was only half-joking. When my boots and I returned, yesterday, from our inaugural stroll together – along the thin tongue of higher ground which separates West Sedge Moor and Curry Moor – she retreated to the bedroom, slamming the door behind her shouting ‘you’d better make your mind up, Juanita – it’s the boots or me’.

She’ll calm down. Strange thing is that although she took the gin with her, I didn’t really care. I sat myself down on the sofa and spent the remainder of the evening ogling my new boots.

The new boots - if these don't get your lovejuices flowing nothing will

Our Lady of the Landscape

It’s a little-known fact – an increasingly little-known fact since the ecumenicalisation of the Catholic Church – that the month of May is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Like many of the more ‘earthy’ and Marian Catholic celebrations it has its origins in popular belief rather than Vatican dogma which is reason enough for the excruciatingly handsome María Inés de la Cruz and me to pour ourselves a couple more girt, humungous G&Ts.

It was a subject we pondered during an exquisite, sun-baked hike that took us over the deliciously horizontal levels of Somerton Moor then up and along the Polden Hills where we followed the almost-eponymous Polden Way and reminisced about last year’s Camino. It was, observed María, a year to the day since we set out on the long journey – we took the train, then the boat, then the train to get to St Jean Pied de Port; something else to celebrate.

You don’t have to be a student of Mariology to work out the connection between May and Our Lady. Several years ago I wrote a paper entitled – with more than an eye for the controversy – Our Lady of the Libido: Towards a Marian Theology of Sexual Liberation which was published in the Journal of Feminist Theology. In it I mused that ‘a fortnight after Easter the earth was finally involved in its own delicious and sensual resurrection and in popular tradition, of course, May is the month of Mary.’

The relationship between Mary and the month of May emerged in Medieval and Tudor England and flourished throughout Europe from the eighteenth century. I can even recall celebrating May pageants at my own, fervently Catholic primary school in the mid-1970s but within a decade the custom had all but died out. The passing was only part-mourned by one parish priest who wondered if it were not wiser ‘to encourage people to have a strong devotion to Mary through imitating her in their own lives instead of focusing on statues’ (The Tablet 2001:577). Such thinking seems to permeate a strand of contemporary thought that seeks to rein in the more pagan aspects of Marian devotion – and with garland and petal strewn processions and maypole dances there can be little doubt that there exists within these May revels a strong link to fertility rites.

Dr Sarah Jane Boss of the Marian Study Centre suggests that the identification of Mary with the month of May was an attempt to rescue it from the pagan festivities that marked the beginning of summer. In her seminal – and I do mean seminal – work on the Cult of the Virgin, Alone of all her Sex, Marina Warner writes ‘all over medieval Europe on May Day, the Queen of the May was crowned and sometimes married to the Green Man, in an ancient fertility rite, that in some places, has survived all bans, Catholic and Protestant alike.’ It was, she suggests, this ‘frivolous’ aspect of Catholicism the Reformers loathed and tried to stamp out (Warner 1976:283).

And if the Reformers loathed it, you can bet your bottom Euro that the insufferably handsome María Inés de la Cruz and I will love it to bits.

'Les Tres Riches Hueres du Duc de Berry: a hunting party of elegent and decorative young courtiers set out in a wood bright with new young leaf. They\wear budding branches in their broad-brimmed hats and some wear bright green surcoats too - the vert gai - the traditional leit-motif for the beginning of summer on the first of May' (Warner 1976:283).

In Our Lady of the Libido I argued that the discontinuation of these syncretistic practices has been to the detriment of a feminist Mariology as they represented an intimate communal celebration of the fecundity of nature: fecundity and desire, Our Lady of the Landscape, imbued with a sensual, erotic magic.

But before I come over all Glastonbury-ish, an important caveat from Ms Warner: ‘The fact that the cult of the Virgin was capable of assimilating so much classical fertility worship reveals that much thinking on the connection between mother Goddesses and matriarchs is erroneous: it is conventional wisdom among some mythographers and feminists to invoke a golden age when the social power and position of women were recognised and reflected in mythology and worship’. There is, insists Ms Warner, ‘no logical equivalence in any society between exalted female objects of worship and a high position of women’ (Warner 1976:283).

   Sadly, both Maria and I feel compelled to agree. No Golden Age, not yet, anyway. And as Ms Warner admits, ‘a goddess is no better than no goddess at all, for the sombre-suited masculine world of Protestant religion is altogether too much like a gentleman’s club to which ladies are only admitted on special days’ (Warner 1976:338).  

Bibliography

Sarah Jane Boss – Empress and Handmaid: On Nature and the Gender of the Virgin Mary – Cassell (2000)

Marina Warner – Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary – Vintage (1976)

My own Private Ida

There lies a vale in Ida, lovelier

Than all the valleys of Ionian hills.

The swimming vapour slopes athwart the glen,

Puts forth an arm, and creeps from pine to pine,

And loiters, slowly drawn. On either hand

The lawns and meadow-ledges midway down

Hang rich in flowers, and far below them roars

The long brook falling thro' the clov'n ravine

In cataract after cataract to the sea.

Behind the valley topmost Gargarus

Stands up and takes the morning: but in front

The gorges, opening wide apart, reveal

Troas and Ilion's column'd citadel,

The crown of Troas.

 Tennyson, Oenone

The Greeks might have their Mount Ida, the Japanese Mount Fuji, the hippies over in Glastonbury have their knobbly Tor but yesterday the unfeasibly handsome María Inés de la Cruz and I came across our own little paradise. Our very own Pico Bonito; a part of South Somerset that will be forever northern Honduras.

It’s fair to say that during our prolonged hibernation beneath the duvets in La Villa Ramblanista our thoughts have wandered to warmer climes; it was all I could do to tear María from the laptop where she was searching for a cheap flight back home to El Salvador. ‘You’ll be lucky,’ I told her, ‘we haven’t even got enough money for a cheap day return to Weymouth.’

So for the first time this year we flexed our pale limbs under the warm, West Country sun – well, my limbs are pale, hers are, as ever, a deep golden brown – our thoughts were still very much on the exotic. After nibbling on a pasty in the sublime surroundings of Wells Market Place we drifted out to and along the old railway line that, once upon a time, connected the ecclesiastical with the agricultural: Wells to Shepton Mallet It was there that Maria noticed the shapely outline of Dulcote Hill. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ she asked. I nodded, images of the beautiful Pico Bonito flashed before our eyes like cartoon pound signs.

Dulcote Hill, Somerset

Pico Bonito, Honduras

It’s difficult to find any accurate information on Pico Bonito. It’s now the focus of a national park, in the Nombre de Dios mountains not far from the Caribbean port of La Ceiba and the Moskita coast. We’ve been there before, of course, but we’ve never got much further than the crystal-clear Rio Zacate. Apparently the first successful ascent didn’t take place until the 1950s and since then only a handful of attempts have been made.  The expedition takes a good ten days at best up vertiginous slopes with dense vegetation.

The ascent of Dulcote Hill, in contrast, doesn’t take more than a good ten minutes scrambling through thicket and scrub and in the absence of poisonous snakes such as the fer-de-lance the only threat to our safety came from slipping through the rusting fence designed to keep the likes of us out of the quarry. I’ll tell you something for nothing; there’s nothing like a ‘Private: Keep Out’ sign to prompt a Ramblanista sortie into the forbidden.

If the north, south and west slopes of Dulcote Hill are precipitous, its west face is a vertical wall of rusty-grey rock because it is, of course, a disused quarry. Just as well our summit celebrations weren’t over-effusive; one false move and either of us could have toppled over the edge. It was a languid afternoon so María and I lay under the sun enjoying the sublime view of England’s most exquisite Cathedral City.

In a couple of years’ time both María and I will be celebrating an important birthday; as we hopped and skipped our way back down to the picture-book literary village that is Queen’s Sturge, an unspoken we discussed what we might do by way of a party. You didn’t have to be a psychic to know what we were both thinking. That evening, sipping on out gin and tonics back in La Villa Ramblanista, the intolerably handsome María Inés de la Cruz fired up the laptop.

‘Shall I?’ she asked, her voice hoarse with anticipation. I nodded. ‘Cheapest flight from London to La Ceiba won’t be any less than eight hundred quid - call that a grand come 2013.’

‘We’d better start saving then ...’

Wet

Floods. Suddenly everyone’s talking about them; suddenly everyone’s an overnight expert on saturated soil and aquifer recharge. Suddenly everyone’s an amateur geography tutor.

The River Brue on Saturday - obligatory Tor in background photo

La Villa Ramblanista has been spared the worst of the inundations, though the stream that runs past our backyard burst its banks and flooded the public schoolboys’ playing fields causing the wannabe rugger-buggers to go without on Saturday. But neither María Inés de la Cruz nor I like to miss out on the next big thing so we decided to step out into the soggy Somerset landscape and see for ourselves what all the fuss was about.

A bridge over relatively untroubled water

We spent most of Saturday evening preparing ourselves for the encounter, aided by several large gin and tonics. María read from One Hundred Years of Solitude in her mellifluous Salvadorean tones; the chapter where it rains in Macondo for four years, eleven months and two days. I showed her an episode of The Young Ones – Flood: just about sums up the gaping difference in our respective cultural aspirations. I don’t think María really got to grips with The Young Ones but when I said I spent a couple of years living in the suburb of Bristol where it was filmed she bombarded me with personal questions. She has something of an obsession with my youth, keeps asking me whether I really had a picture of Jon Bon Jovi on my bedroom wall and wants a detailed description of the contents of my wardrobe. ‘You’ll just have to wait for the publication of Death by Eyeliner, my shocking autobiography’, I told her and she sulked for the remainder of the evening.

Not for us it ain't! These three words don't feature in the Ramblanista vocabulary

But I digress. By the time we’d got back from mass and argued about whether we’d go north, south, east or west – maps, of course, are for wimps – it had gone noon and the clouds were already rolling in; just as well we got a lift to North Wootton with the landlord and landlady of La Villa Ramblanista. At least we managed to agree on a strategy; it wasn’t a day to be squelching off across the waterlogged fields so we stuck to tracks and roads. Just as well, the rhynes were full and parts of the moor were under fifty centimetres of water.

Geology porn: Yeovil Sands in holloway on Pennard Hill

But the truth is that the reality didn’t really match up to the hype; they had it much worse around Taunton and Langport. Now don’t get me wrong, as an itinerant geography tutor I’m offering accused of getting off on other people’s misery, of having an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of tsunami death tolls but you know what they say about Japan being the best place to be when an earthquake strikes? Well you might say the same thing about the Levels and flooding. It’s almost as if some omnipotent deity created them for that purpose and that purpose alone; the moors lie only a metre or so above mean sea level and the structural geology tilts the strata in such a manner that only the construction of man-made drainage channels such as the Huntspill River and a network of pumping stations keeps the sea and the floodwaters in some form of abeyance. In any case, times change, even in the sexy but staid world of land management and wetlands, once the bane of the drainage engineer, are back in fashion.

Random quaint Westcountry signpost porn

A bit like the nineteen-eighties, I suppose. María listened patiently but her eyes only lit up when I started to talk about clyses. When she found out they had nothing to do with intimate sexual pleasure but were, in fact, sluice gates, we decided it was time to head back to the Cathedral City.

She led, I followed, isn’t it always thus?

María thought this sign read 'Roads liable to grow breasts'. She spends far too much time in my company.