A Garland of May:An Evening of May Folklore with Lisa Knapp.

"Unite and unite and let us all unite for summer is a-comin' today and whither we are going we all will unite in the merry morning of May" - Padstow May Song.

I didn't expect, when I left the house on Thursday afternoon, to end up sat in a room above a pub (while rowdy football fans downstairs cheered on Chelsea against Eintracht Frankfurt and Arsenal versus Valencia) singing (badly) along to a folk song from Cornwall that both welcomes in the month of May and, very pertinently for me at the moment, makes comment on our corporeal impermanence.

Man, they say, blooms like a flower and fades just as quickly too. I'd long known that but me and my friends had it brought home to us with a particularly cruel sucker punch to the guts very recently. It had made me ponder not just the mortality of myself,my friends, and my family but the mortality of everybody and everything. It had driven home to me how short our time here is and how we have to, somehow, eke out the very most of it - and, if we can, find like minded souls to share it with.

Some of the places I find like minded souls are at the meetings of the London Skeptics, the Greenwich Skeptics, the London Fortean Society, and, most recently of all, SELFS (the South East London Folklore Society) and last night's talk at The Old King's Head on Borough High Street, A Garland of May with Lisa Knapp, proved to be no exception.

The March SELFS event had seen me toasting the Thames with its own water and if that seemed a bizarre, but lovely, way to end an evening then Lisa Knapp's singalong version of the Padstow May Song was even more lovely, if a little less bizarre. It was a busy evening, folk were sat on the floor, and (and this surprised me) there were no shortage of takers for the sing-song. At one point even drowning out some of those noisier footy fans beneath us.

I'd seen Lisa once before (February 2017, the Barbican, Shirley Collin's Lodestar concert) and, perhaps due to being in such close proximity to the likes of Shirley and Alasdair Roberts she'd failed to make much of a lasting impression on me. That certainly changed on Thursday evening.

The roughly ninety minute talk was almost as much a gig as it was a lecture, six rather wonderful songs both punctuated and illuminated Lisa's talk. Showing a valiant spirit in not allowing some early technical gremlins to put her off her stride, Lisa started off by telling us about the research she'd done, much of it in Cecil Sharp House, for her recent Til April is Dead album. One that celebrates the tradition of welcoming in May. Or a May. Or the May. Any kind of May really, except Theresa!

She spoke about the May traditions of Jack in the Green in Hastings, the Rochester Sweeps Festival, maypoles, May Day, St George and the dragon, May Queens, the Padstow Hobby Horse (or Obby Oss), and the folkloric songs that emanate from England. She informed us that Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream is actually set on May eve and she punctuated this with brief excerpts of May songs by Martin Carthy and, I can't get too much of her, Shirley Collins.

On an unseasonably wet day, she'd festooned the upper bar of The Old King's Head with greenery and as I sipped modestly on a brace of Doom Bars, Lisa told us about the tradition of 'garlanding'. Garlanding seems to consist of laying greenery on rich people's door steps and then singing outside their houses in the hope of obtaining money, beer, or food.

In New Romney and Lydd in the 1420s, and then again in Launceston in the 1430s, there are records of people paying to have 'the May' brought in. It's even said that Henry VII paid ten shillings to some maidens in Lambeth for this service. Well, that's what he said.

But the tradition dates back further than the fifteenth century. Using Ronald Hutton's Stations of the Sun and Steve Round's The English Year as her primary sources, Lisa told us that the first recorded reference to Beltane, the precursor of May Day, comes from approx. 900AD. Folk would force themselves to pass through fires in the hope of warding off illnesses and bad spirits, if not third degree burns!

The Beltane traditions belonged, and still belong, more to Wales and Scotland than they do to England where the more innocent maypole seems to be the centre point for May festivities. It is innocent too. There's no evidence to be found whatsoever, sadly, that the Maypole was some kind of phallic symbol associated with fertility rituals. Although we all know what a young man's mind turns to once spring has sprung. Something it's not been far off all winter, truth be told.

Neither are maypoles believed to be representative of some kind of ancient Germanic tree god. Which is nearly as disappointing. The first literary reference to a maypole appears in 1240 when a bishop in Lincoln mentions the use of one. At first the clergy had no strong feelings about maypoles but with the rise of puritanical thought around the Elizabethan era this all changed and maypoles fell out of favour for a few decades. The shaft in the church of St Andrew Undershaft, near the Gherkin, was once a maypole but was destroyed by puritans as far back as the 1500s.

Following the Restoration, maypoles were back and back to stay. Victorians later prettified both maypoles, and all May traditions - which by now included dancing milkmaids (from the 1600s onwards) and, a century after the milkmaids, gyrating chimney sweeps who found themselves both short of work and monies come May and were prepared to dance for their dinner.

It's a noticeably working class tradition and a big part of the reason for that is because these were the times before the opening of great people's parks and, especially, large indoor spaces where the commoners could gather. So May became fixed in the calendar as a time when people could go outside, dance, mix, and celebrate. The first big annual get together.

Unlike other holidays like Easter, Christmas, and Whitsun, the May celebrations are not of a religious nature and seem to put the focus more on nature and friendship. With that in mind it was a rather lovely touch that Lisa's first song of the evening, The Night Before May Day, should involve samples of local people, wildlife, and even livestock.

Later songs like Jack in the Green made use of testimonies from the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the Cornish song Hal-an-Tow contained references to washing one's face in the May dew and sounded to me a bit like the folktronica band Tunng, and Don't You Go-A-Rushing, Maids in May saw Lisa finally get to have a go on the viola that'd been sitting lonesome by her side all evening.

Elsewhere, there was a song that was left unnamed but contained recordings of birdsong and was truly beautiful. Parish notices touched on next month's talk about John Michell (a big man on the megalith scene - and also a man who weighed the Earth), this Sunday's Pagan pride festival in Russell Square (the world's oldest I learnt), and a free folk festival in Bermondsey in September featuring the brilliant Stick in the Wheel (think The Streets gone folk) but it was Lisa's talk, and her music, that really made the evening.

Towards the end of the week in which I'd witnessed great sadness and seen a great friend's life taken away by cancer it was humbling to be back in the company of good people, sharing stories and songs, and celebrating the beauty of nature and the beauty of this world. It's not something we should take for granted. We won't have it forever.