May Day Trivia

May Day in the West Country involves drinking, singing, dancing and-occasionally-fighting.

• May Day celebrations have all but died out in the UK save for two spots-the Cornish port of Padstow (made famous by TV chef Rick Stein) and the Somerset resort of Minehead, once a playground for the rich and royal but now best known for Butlins.
• According to May Day veterans, a drunken reveller in Padstow once punched Rick Stein after he finished filming, telling him 'F*** off, this is our day.' (Stein declines to discuss the story. 'I really don't think we'd want to comment,' a spokeswoman says.)
• Both the Padstow and Minehead celebrations feature two rival Hobby Horses (or Obby Osses), none of which looks like a horse Each 'Oss'-essentially a masked, one-man parade float-gallivants through town, trying to trap women under its skirt, symbolically impregnating them.
• In Minehead, the Sailor's Horse also tries to whack onlookers in the head with its hind weapon-a stinking, freshly amputated cow's tail.
• In Padstow, the rival Osses and their retinues dance together around the maypole at the end of the day.
• Like hobby horses, maypoles date from at least the mid-1300s in Britain. Some experts reckon the erections protected commoners' rights or scared off evil spirits, though the favourite explanation is that they were fertility symbols.
• In 1583, Puritan pamphleteer Phillip Stubbes denounced the maypole as a 'stinkying ydol' that encouraged all-night debauchery. 'Of 40, threescore or a hundred maids going to the wood over night, there have scarcely the third part of them returned home again undefiled,' Stubbes claimed.
• The famous philosopher Thomas Hobbes speculated that maypoles may have started as tributes to the Roman god Priapus.
• Three centuries later, Sigmund 'Everything's Phallic' Freud rammed home the priapic link, forever casting doubt on the virginal Queen of the May.
• Victorian art critic John Ruskin popularised maypole plaiting in the 1890s, condemning future generations of schoolchildren to dizzying dance routines.
• Rumour has it that Ruskin failed to erect his own personal maypole on his wedding night after being shocked to find that his wife had pubic hair. Classically educated, Ruskin thought women had hair only on their heads. The marriage was never consummated.