Have had no internet access since last weekend - and still don't, so this is a very quick post on dial-up to reassure people that I'm still alive! What has happened to the line we don't know (some very bad weather recently) but I hope to have normal service restored as soon as possible (several more irate conversations with call centres later probably).
Meanwhile the Appleby Horse Fair is about to start and the Mill has become a gypsy encampment.
Some beautiful horses and traditional caravans.
Meanwhile I'm going to miss it this year, as I'm just off to Italy for the annual Peralta creative writing course. Plus a much needed dose of sunshine and decent wine!
The Gypsy Fair has gone and the trampled grass verges are greening up with the rain. In a few days you will hardly notice that anyone has been there. But the post mortems are just starting. First through the door was a letter from the police requesting feedback about their handling of the event.
A lot of people will be pleased because for the first time in many years there was very little trouble. It was certainly one of the quietest fairs I have ever experienced. But the atmosphere was less than pleasant. Sometimes in town it seemed that there were more police than visitors. Only two pubs were open - Appleby has seven - and several were boarded up. Those that were open found themselves surrounded by a cordon of police, some on horseback. Appleby might just as well have put up a ‘Gypsies not wanted here’ notice.
The gypsies mounted a silent protest, which I missed. They drove their horses into town, set them loose and stood completely silent, blocking the traffic in all directions, with the police facing them on the other side. Apparently the atmosphere felt menacing, until they gathered up the horses and cleared the road. There was no violence.
But there was no exuberance either, or the sense of joyous celebration that comes with the fair. A lot of people on holiday, enjoying themselves. This year, by Saturday evening a lot of people were leaving. And instead of staying until Thursday, most of the caravans left on Monday.
I can understand why some of the people of Appleby feel as they do. With the fair comes a certain amount of drunkenness and bad behaviour - the local pubs are used to taking up the carpets and removing anything that isn’t nailed down - and a certain amount of crime. Where you get huge numbers of people there is always an element who will use that as cover. There is also a huge amount of litter and garbage - hedgerows get used as toilets and it’s not pretty. But Appleby doesn’t have the infra-structure to cope with the number of people who come.
There’s also the inbuilt prejudice to Romanies that seems to exist across Europe - it Italy it’s the same. I found myself wondering what it must be like to belong to an ethnic group that everyone seems to hate.
But if the gypsies stopped coming to Appleby, it would lose a huge part of its annual revenue. For some businesses their income over ‘Fair Week’ (as it’s known locally) is all that keeps them going. And the horse fair is Appleby’s main claim to fame for the tourist trade. Quite a dilemma.
If you want a flavour of the Fair in its sunniest mood - Neil shot this little video on the instant camera - the musician is Catherine Ashcroft.
I've decided not to put poems in the sidebar, which distorts the line breaks, but to put them up in the main body of the blog from now on. I've also been accepted as one of the Tuesday Poemgroup and am committed to putting up a poem (not necessarily my own) every Tuesday if I can. They wake me early, cantering along the river-bank below my window; testy stallions and barrel-bellied mares with velvet mouths and feathered shins, bare-backed by Irish gypsies over for the Fair.
Later I watch the pure-bred horses harnessed in sulkies jouncing across the grass, arching their necks and lifting their polished hooves like gods from old mythologies.
In my house their ancestors gallop under the floor. Five horses heads; ivory shells of thin bone, blank sockets rearing up at me out of another time. Shaman's stallions, carrying souls to heaven. Five white horses: one to protect
each corner of the house, one more to bring fertility, sacrificed at the fall of the year. Their shoes are above the door. Their manes and tails pack the space between my floor boards curl in the plastered wall.
Outside I watch them turn and trot, hock deep in foaming water, "broken to harness" under the whip flesh and sinew sold on a hand-clap. At night I hear their mythic hooves beating on wood; their snorting breath.
I wrote the poem lying in bed listening to the horses on the river bank below my bedroom window, during the Gypsy Horse Fair in Appleby. The town has a long association with horses and, although we don't have any horses carved into the landscape as in southern England, some of the houses here have horses' skulls buried under the floors. The mystical significance of this has long vanished, but the traditional Horse Fair continues.
This is what Appleby is famous for - a gathering of gypsies and horse traders. Every year this quiet, rather conservative town has its population boosted from around three and a half thousand to thirty thousand by an influx of Romany travellers from all over the UK and Europe, as well as all the tourists who come to see them. For the residents, it's rather like being under seige. The fair is very ancient, though it’s bizarrely called the New Fair, because a new charter was handed out by James II in 1685 to legalise a previously unregulated gathering. The long association with horses here has some strange manifestations. Sometimes, digging up the floors of old houses, horses heads have been found buried underneath. Most of the horses are the small, compact, brown and white horses traditionally bred by the Romanies. They’re much used for ‘trotting’ - sometimes called cart or gig racing - and the fastest fetch huge sums of money here. There’s a big Irish presence and I’m constantly reminded that some of my ancestors were Irish horse-traders. It was in my father’s blood and I seem to have inherited his love of horses along with the dodgy Irish genes! We live on the river bank, so we are right in the centre of activity and have to fence off the garden to stop it being trampled down. Once, when we failed to get the wire up in time, we came home to find three horses on the front lawn, one tied to the apple tree and a very large four wheel drive parked beside it.
Every morning the horses intended for sale are brought down to the river to be washed and groomed. Today was mares and foals day - some of the foals only a few days old.
Tomorrow it will be stallions. Further downstream, where the bridge crosses into town, the river is very deep and a lot of the horses are brought down to swim - most ridden by children. But sometimes adults are tempted to take them in and you can see the horses struggling to stay afloat. In previous years there have been a number of accidents, including the deaths of horses, and the RSPCA have a big presence here. Anyone with a strong stomach can follow this link to YouTube.
