Summer is i-going out, lude sing hurrah - it's almost safe to go back in to the museum. Soon the jousters, peasants in rags, ladies in wimples, tumblers in motley, world war one soldiers in puttees, and orphans in polyester smocks will all have gone away to whatever Hieronymus Bosch hell they spend their winters in.
As a child I was terrified of clowns - I blame a winter circus which ended spectacularly with the clowns as firemen hilariously failing to put out a real blaze in the ring - and now you only have to shake a costumed re-enactor's jerkin, buskin or bodkin at me and the fight or flight adrenalin surge rushes in.
If you cut me, do I not bleed? Not in the world of history lite, where the unfortunate jiggers and jousters are not allowed to do any of the things that might make the past vivid: they cannot fart, swear or stink, they slice without cutting and punch without bruising, and you will not catch fleas, lice or cholera from rubbing up against them.
If they cook something, as they almost invariably do, the bystanders may not join the feast for fear of going down with medieval belly, and suing. As in the poem Albert and the Lion, no wrecks and nobody drownded, nothing to laff at at all.
I bear them no ill will (well, I do actually, though not as much as I do towards the museum bosses who let them loose), - but basically I really don't know what to do with them. I don't know what to tell the Infant Samuel to make of them.
I cannot bridge the abyss between the real objects in the cases in the museum, and the well-fed, well-vaccinated people poncing about with replicas in the courtyard.
I don't want to be rude to their shining eager-to-please faces, so I assume a witless grin of generalised goodwill, and pray for winter - until Christmas, when, strap me, they'll all be back with their plastic holly sprigs to show us how to create an authentic Yuletide.
As a child I was terrified of clowns - I blame a winter circus which ended spectacularly with the clowns as firemen hilariously failing to put out a real blaze in the ring - and now you only have to shake a costumed re-enactor's jerkin, buskin or bodkin at me and the fight or flight adrenalin surge rushes in.
If you cut me, do I not bleed? Not in the world of history lite, where the unfortunate jiggers and jousters are not allowed to do any of the things that might make the past vivid: they cannot fart, swear or stink, they slice without cutting and punch without bruising, and you will not catch fleas, lice or cholera from rubbing up against them.
If they cook something, as they almost invariably do, the bystanders may not join the feast for fear of going down with medieval belly, and suing. As in the poem Albert and the Lion, no wrecks and nobody drownded, nothing to laff at at all.
I bear them no ill will (well, I do actually, though not as much as I do towards the museum bosses who let them loose), - but basically I really don't know what to do with them. I don't know what to tell the Infant Samuel to make of them.
I cannot bridge the abyss between the real objects in the cases in the museum, and the well-fed, well-vaccinated people poncing about with replicas in the courtyard.
I don't want to be rude to their shining eager-to-please faces, so I assume a witless grin of generalised goodwill, and pray for winter - until Christmas, when, strap me, they'll all be back with their plastic holly sprigs to show us how to create an authentic Yuletide.
