May Day!

Staying up all night partying and dancing and celebrating the arrival of summer (or close enough), then staggering over to Magdalen Tower in Oxford at 6am to join the crowds of other revelers in listening to the bells ring and the choir sing, then pushing your way down the High Street afterwards for an early breakfast and even more dancing and revelry... Sounds like a good start to May 1st, aka May Day, right?

Minus the all-nighter (this grad student opted to go to bed at 10pm last night and got up at 5am), I was one of the masses out this morning for Oxford's celebrated tradition of May morning, in which -- as I mentioned -- thousands of students and local civilians and other Brits gather outside Magdalen College at the crack of dawn to bid farewell to the winter and welcome in the brighter days of summer. (Or so they think, anyway. Today has been pretty miserably rainy, so May thus far isn't looking much better than the last few months.) Thanks to a friend and other Rhodes scholar who is a Junior Dean (aka RA) at Magdalen, we got to file into the college grounds (and stand on the hallowed grass!!) and see the tower and listen to the choir sing, rather than standing with the crush of people outside the college on the High Street. It was a little unearthly, and one of those moments where it hit me: I am at Oxford, and this is such a magical and strange and confusing and wonderful place sometimes. After the choir had finished singing, we made our way through the massive crowds and the music and bells and squares of Oxford, to one of the many restaurants open for breakfast this morning.

All of this is part of a very old and very longstanding tradition. May Day, quite befuddlingly to this American, is an ancient spring festival that is also a bank holiday in the UK in the modern era, and traditionally involves such rites as dancing around maypoles, crowning a May Day king or queen, and other group rituals celebrating planting, spring, and the arrival of the warmer months. It derives from pre-Christian European pagan cultures, and indeed there were many pagan dancers out this morning wearing feathered hats and bells and flowers and vines, while playing bagpipes and fiddles and other instruments all through Oxford... all at six in the morning with more people out on the streets than I had ever seen out at the hour of 6am before in my life... what is this place?? The energy, even ebullience, was palpable even from those who had stayed up the entire night, and I felt like I had been transported into another, more distant time. Into timelessness, even. I really don't have anything else to say about it than how strange it was. Yet it was so lighthearted and fun to participate in that ritualized celebration.

Hello, summer! I can see you approaching. Welcome to this very quirky northern island.