Deep soup and hay fights
This weekend just gone was the annual Thames Festival, which seems to get bigger and bigger every year. On Saturday, there was also the second Feast on the Bridge, where Southwark Bridge is closed off to traffic and turned into a banqueting area, with tables and chairs stretching the length of the bridge. There were teapots filled with flowers on all of the tables, which were covered with lovely hand-printed tablecloths, featuring food stories from Londoners.
There were food stalls at the south end, featuring many of the usual suspects from nearby Borough Market, and a music stage at the north end. This year there were also piles of hay bales that slowly got destroyed in giant hay fights, with loose piles of hay covering about a third of the bridge, and giving off a lovely sweet smell. This smell was evocative enough to carry me off to childhood summers spent running around fields, sleeping in tents, sitting by campfires - an existence about as far removed from the City of London, and all it signifies, as one could get. The sense of dissonance was increased when I wandered past a stand where there was something cooking in cast iron cauldrons over an open embers, and again my nose was tantalised by smells which took me back to those childhood summers spent running around fields, sleeping in tents, sitting by campfires, to the days when we ate food that had been cooked over those campfires. It's a very old-fashioned smell, not in a twee nostalgic kind of way, but in the sense that for thousands of years, people cooked food in cast iron pots, over open fires. It's not a smell that's easily replicated by modern cooking devices, but it's a smell that always makes me hungry.
It turned out that it was pumpkin soup being cooked in the cauldrons, and that the cauldrons did indeed belong to a witch. She was doing a "deep soup ceremony" and I happened to be standing there when the ceremony started, to coincide with low tide at 18:53. Most people standing around were there like me, wondering what the heck a "deep soup ceremony" was, and whether there was any free food. The answer to the latter question was yes, as the distributing and sharing of soup was part of the ritual, which had been created to remind people of the cycle of life, and that food tastes better when it's home-grown and home-cooked. The speechifying was a little hippy-dippy, even by the standards of someone like me, who'd just been evoked into remembering childhood summers spent running around fields at hippy festivals, but the soup was quite tasty, and I enjoyed the social aspects of sharing food with strangers.
After that, I wandered northwards to the other end of the bridge, and watched Carlos & the Bandidos, a fun rock'n'roll covers band dressed as caballeros. Lots of people were dancing, including the ever-present, no-London-festival-would-be-complete-without-them east end Elvises. There was also a big hay fight still in progress, but I managed to come away unscathed, with no hay clinging to my nice cashmere cardigan - not everyone did! In fact, I spotted patches of hay which made it as far as the bus stop right outside St. Paul's, a good five minutes walk from Southwark Bridge.
Sunday's festival was quieter, but still busy. There didn't seem to be a lot going on as I wandered around, the bands had all obviously had a hard night on Saturday because they were all being quite sedate and a little too lacking in energy, in my opinion. Luckily, we found a fun band, Joe le Taxi & the Zydeco Band, way down near Tower Bridge, and they were putting on a rollicking good performance, with lots of people dancing and having fun. That made up for completely missing any sight at all of the carnival parade, which was totally obscured by the large numbers of people gridlocked around the parade route. Didn't even stay for the fireworks this year.
