The American poet Emily Dickinson wrote these words to the arrival of the month of March. I must say that, as I write this in early February, huddled over the radiator, I am in accordance with Ms Dickinson: welcome March and goodbye to gloomy January and February.
Here’s hoping that the month will herald not just Spring, but also a new phase of living with COVID- last time I will mention the acronym, honestly!
The month of March is an intriguing one from the perspective of festivals, feasts and adages. We have all heard the term ‘Beware the Ides of March’ from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, but as a child I had no idea what Ides were: a monster, a skin (hide without the aitch) a mishearing of eyes? Now, of course, as an adult who has read Julius Caesar many times, I know that Ides refers to the middle of March and was infamously the date when Julius Caesar was assassinated in Rome in 44BC. Thanks to Wikipedia, I now also know that the Romans had three set points for their months- the Nones, the Ides and the Kalends, reflecting the lunar origins of the calendar months. Yet another set of facts that will set me up well for University Challenge, should the subject-matter ever emerge!
From a Christian point of view, this March sees the start of Lent. The day before Lent, commonly known as Pancake Day, is known in many countries as Shrove Tuesday, the term Shrove being the past tense of the verb to Shrive ie a day on which to confess one’s sins. Personally, I have always loved the French title Mardi Gras, prosaically, translated into English as Fat Tuesday, the time traditionally when feasting took place before the fasting of Lent. Even more fascinatingly for me, it took me a while to realise that the word Carnival was a corruption of the term Carne Vale, ‘farewell to meat’, which in turn, was a folkloric corruption of the Late Latin expression carne levare, which means “remove meat”.
Growing up in lugubrious Lancashire in the 1980s, the ostentation of the Carnival in Rio was impossibly glamorous, with my having no idea that it was historically linked to a religious festival: in the Middle Ages, Carnival was the time between the Epiphany and Lent, culminating in the feasting of Shrove Tuesday and then the meat-free austerity of Lent. I cannot remember any great celebrations on Shrove Tuesday, but Ash Wednesday was a momentous day and greeted with a solemnity that instilled a mixture of awe and dread as I received the Lenten ashes on my forehead.
The use of the symbolic ashes had its historical basis in Biblical times, with the ashes being used to represent grief. It then became part of the Christian tradition, and by the end of the first millennium, priests inscribed a cross in ashes on the foreheads of penitents, a version of which is still in practice today. It is seen a memento mori and I still remember my visceral fear as the priest intoned: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
On a less sombre note, I always have loved the adage that says March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. In my head I still have a a picture of the lion as Aslan, and the lamb as Lamb Chop, the TV puppet: if you know who he is, you are giving away your ag