There’s a great big papier maché dead chicken in the back of my car. We couldn’t leave it at The Flask. It feels like it needs some sort of ritual burning, and now we are in bonfire season surely the opportunity will present itself. If not perhaps we must make the opportunity ourselves, but… living in London makes spontaneous bonfires a tricky idea. The Heath is crawling with law enforcement. Every night we would encounter these mildly overzealous park rangers, driving slowly through the walkways, making their presence felt. Any attempt to light up a chicken there and they would be on us like a gull on chips.
I can’t carry the thing in Bergman indefinitely though, and I don’t want to just dump it as it has too much personality and history. It’s pretty much ruined so we will have to find a solution. If the walk goes back to Pond Square, it won’t be for a few years, and we can find a new chicken should we need it. It’s a good story – a genuine ghost of a chicken. It was killed by Francis Bacon during a drunken row about freezing meat in the 1620’s. He caught the pneumonia that killed him while rolling it around in snow. People most frequently reported it during the blitz and rationing, but this strange avian ghost is a genuine London haunting. Our big chicken is deliberately a bit unwieldy and silly. It nicely sets the tone for a broad comedic walk.
This evening Siwan and I ran about deconstructing that walk. Getting the chicken out of The Flask was a small part of it. We also had to get the gin and the horns from The Star. That’s a lovely silly thing we do, swearing on the horns. A mischievous nod to Cernunnos dressed up in boozy silliness.
In Highgate people have been “swearing on the horns” for centuries. Siwan nicked the oath. There are very formal reenactment groups that do it from time to time for charity. We do it for fun and false pomposity – arguably the original purpose. It never really had any meaning other than silliness. But we all keep forgetting : silliness is important! Swearing on the horns is a silly way of making a false hierarchy and then all coming together in a pointless consensus. We do that sort of thing every day and call it office politics. More and more we have to remember to be silly just for the point of being silly. If it is all very very serious then we start to forget the joy that we are surely here to try and find in this existence. Then we might forget ourselves in seriousness.
AlBarclay 