I am a pirate

Brighton is hilly, and the hillsides are all traversed by rowhouses, chimneyed and slate-roofed. There are always seagulls in the sky, calling out noisily.

Yesterday morning Rachael and I drove westward along the coast in her pink Nissan Figaro, through towns such as Hove and Arundel and Chichester. English place names are like words in a poem, beautiful and evocative--intimately connected, for me, to books and reading, to the imaginative landscape of myriad eighteenth and nineteenth century British novels.

We drove through West Sussex, to Kingley Vale, an ancient yew forest on the chalk downlands. The trees are squat and wide, with broad twisty trunks, reddish-brown bark, and long limbs that grow more sideways than upwards; the lower branches droop down to the duff, and sometimes will send down roots where they contact the forest floor, giving birth to a new tree. We ambled through the Robin Hood grove and out the other side to where a steep, grassy slope reached up towards a ridge. Halfway up we sat down on the green turf and ate a picnic overlooking the yews, with Chichester in the distance down the valley, and beyond the town the sea.

We lingered a bit too long, because we were late for the medieval wedding at Highdown Hillfort, another park, near Worthing back along the coast. Once at Highdown, we could not find the hillfort, though we wandered about and asked directions of some of the people out for a Saturday stroll, none of whom were helpful. We ended up missing the ceremony entirely (which was not actually a wedding, but what they called a "handfasting," an old pagan practice in which the relationship is reviewed once a year and the two people then decide whether or not to continue or to make adjustments). I did, though, get to see the celebrants when they returned to the car park in small, costumed bunches.

The invitation had requested medieval dress, but added that one could also dress "pirate, dragon, jester, or musketeer." Dragons and jesters were rare, but there were many pirates (including the groom himself) and a few musketeers among the Knights and Maid Marions. Myself, I'd tied a red bandana around my head and sported a single dangly silver earring Rachael had loaned me. Not much more than a gesture, I'm afraid, but my brown rolled up pants were vaguely pirate-y too. Most of the guests had more full costumes but a number were historically or regionally anomalous--a smattering of Elizabethan and Tudor, a few Tyrolean or beer garden. One man, inexplicably, wore a Sherlock Holmes outfit.

While we missed the ceremony, we did attend the reception at a pub, The Cricketers, down in Worthing. In a green garden at the back of the pub tables were set out in the grass. A whole and large pig was impaled on a spit, roasting over a bed of hot coals, its legs stretched out forward and back, the open cavity of its underside facing down. Its mouth and eyes were open. Rachael was taken aback, though we had been forewarned of the "hogroast." We found a table of her friends, and she said, with disapproval, "its eyes are blue." Milky blue, I'd describe them, in their cooked state. Several of her friends, also vegetarians, shared Rachael's discomfort, and shivered in agreement.

These were friends from work, and notably more conventional than those I'd met the night before. They were Worthing people, and apparently Worthing is rather dowdy in comparison to bohemian Brighton. But like many of the Brighton folk, the wedding couple were setting out on a new relationship after shedding previous longterm partners. The bride, Harri, had been married for twenty-five largely unsatisfactory years to someone Rachael described as a "grumpy bastard." Now she had taken up with John, a train driver, and appeared quite happy. She came around to our table and the conversation turned to John's qualities. Harri recalled a saw that the other woman recognized: that it actually takes five men to satisfy a woman: one for for intellectual stimulation, one for good sex, one for his good looks, one for his money, and one who is handy (or "DIY," as Harri put it). She was happy to report that John fulfilled three of these requirements, but she didn't say which three.

All the women at my table--Carol and Lorna and Sam and Foxie and Elaine--worked in health care, and the conversation was mostly work-related, though more about bad managers than actual sick people. Eventually the pig was declared finished, and a blonde man in shorts began slicing pieces from its haunches and from along its ribs. Rachael pointed and said, "look," her voice indicating both horror and wonder. We soon joined a long line headed towards the pig and platters of meat and shish kabobs. Rachael opted for baked potato and roast corn and salad, but I did have some of the pig and it was excellent.

Already Spain is receding. England and the English have captured my attention, and I want to walk all over the country and see what is to be seen and talk to people who speak with appealing and mellifluous accents.