Mazey Day

This coming Saturday it will be Mazey Day in Penzance. I have not been to Penzance for three years, and before that, for another five. Yet this town at the end of lands was home for eight years and whilst I have no wish to return and live there, every once in a while, I miss Mazey Day.

Summer and winter in Cornwall do not go uncelebrated. Whereas in the rest of England, there are some desultory attempts to mark May Day or St. George’s Day or Mid Summer’s Eve, only the Celtic nations know how to do this properly. Living in Penzance, a place where the weather matters because so many earn their living from it, they make a thing about the world turning in its seasons. A Pagan thing. It’s like the film The Wicker Man – people in extreme parts of the country make a big deal out of their rites. They have a deeper connection with the natural world than big city dwellers, who are more distracted by ephemera and where weather and seasonality are an irrelevance to the day to day business of living. In these land extremeties where life clings to the coast, they mark the passage of the year with reverence.

All over the county, there are summer and winter festivals. Helston has Flora Day, where congas of people dance down the streets and in and out of each other’s houses; St.Just has Lafrowda, where politically incorrect black-face-painted folk dance in crow feathers and top hats. But Penzance has the Queen of festivals: the ten day long Golowan (Cornish for the feast of St. John, a midsummer festival) and its crowning glory… Mazey Day.

I lived in Cornwall between 2006 and 2013. I remember our first Mazey Day. I remember thinking how glad I was to have brought my boys to a place where such things happen – even though they were both still tucked up in bed as I ventured out to watch the first parade of the day. I have always been a sucker for the communal – Bonfire Night remains my favourite night of the year, with its fire and feasting barbarism. So Mazey Day, with its dancing, carousing, singing, music, pageantry, fancy dress, silliness, spectacle, mockery of pomp and riotous assembly was preaching to the converted. Sign me up.

Mazey started early for me. As the sun rises over Mounts Bay and as the town wakes, a morning swim off Battery Rocks round the back of the art deco Lido Jubilee Pool set it all up beautifully. Lying on the rocks soaking up the sun with a flask of hot chocolate and a silver foil wrapped breakfast of butter and marmalade toast completed the dip and the revelry began. The town doesn’t take long to get going as the first parade of the day is an early one. The star attraction in 2008 was the Rajasthan Marching Band, making a return appearance after their first outing three years earlier. The colour of their costumes is magnificently incongruous on the streets of this working Cornish town, and yet they fit right in.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Over the years we had several visitors who came to join the revelry. Nieces, in laws, parents, friends and drinking buddies. It is good to have visitors when the town is dressed in its finery. The pubs all threw open their doors and the Arts Club was still (just) a going concern, you were never far from a drink. Which was just as well because you were also never far from an ex-girlfriend or an old flame (it’s a small town), and you don’t want to be button holed by one of them when you are trying to enjoy yourself.

• 

• 

• 

The day is peppered with big parades – four of them – and each one presents different floats, different bands. There was a very tall, bald man, who seemed to appoint himself the chief leader of the bigger parades. He wore a striking white outfit, offset with a sash and black tailcoat and top hat – like an Aryan version of Baron Samedi, the voodoo God of Death in the Bond film Live and let die. I always thought he looked rather sinister but he possessed a certain authority, too. Just as the leader of a pagan ritual should look.

The floats are often sea themed – giant squid, shoals of glittering fish, basking sharks (which frequent the western coastal waters in Spring) and the most striking one I ever saw: four white horses representing their seaborn namesakes, made from papier maché and life size, rising out of a white-foamed, blued waved sea. As the float progressed, the white horses rose and fell with the sea swell. It was inventive and ingenious as well as beautiful. The incarnation of the seaside spirit.

• 

• 

• 

• 

For seven of my eight years in Penzance, I lived in a very large flat in an old gothic mansion that had formerly served as a gentlemen’s residence. It was held together by plaster and faith and the glass extension to my bedroom always felt as if it would collapse in the next Atlantic storm. But it was very pretty, with ornate high ceilings, massive, spacious rooms and views over the extensive garden down the hill to the sea. My flat in Alverne Hay was about half a mile from the centre of town and made a lovely retreat from the frenetic activity on Mazey Day. My family home, St. Mary’s Place, was in a pretty enclosure just round the back of the main streets and was, consequently, the backdrop for carousing and partying: the Royal wedding of Kate and William in 2011 was a particularly riotous assembly and all the ‘witches’ coven’ of wonderful strong women we collected as friends often descended for impromptu Prosecco evenings. Mazey Day was another excuse for a party. As if one was needed.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Once the parades were done, the evening set in and everyone went to the fair. The whole Promenade was dressed to the nines in a riot of colour and flashing fairground lights. By now the town was drunk – both on alcohol and the natural high of the day (plus other substances). It freewheeled into the early morning hours and, at last, became still. Waking to a monumental hangover as Sunday, the town basks in sunshine once more, more music and revelry but of a quieter mode. The weekend plays out and Mazey weekend is done for another year.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Mazey Day became a bit samey after a few years. Small town life is like that; the novelty value wears off and each Mazey Day looked and felt very similar to the next. Which is why I am a citizen of anywhere rather than a person from somewhere. But I am glad there are people from somewhere. They stay their ground, are proud of their place and know how to let their hair down at the right time (which is anytime). And to have been part of that for a while was wonderful.