Firstly can I apologise? This is a combined issue, with August pushing into September. We didn’t start the year with that plan but as June developed our commitments to the Brest Festival became more clear and I realised there was no way with our small team to be able to attend Brest as part of the British Village and to also produce a magazine that readers might want to read.
So push came up to shove and I think what we used to call a command decision was made. August was given leave and put back in the box while we packed the car, including Guy (our very own cocktail maker), and drove, via Plymouth and Roscoff plus the overnight ferry to visit France’s pre-eminent naval base for eight days in July.
The first time I went to Brest was on the newly built Russian Frigate Shtandart – so named I sometimes think, because she’ll shtandart in a crowd. We had leaks and wild weather, breakages and the implacable Russian sense of how things will get done.
This time the now 16-year-old Shtandart was on a quay with two other reconstructed vessels, both 18th-century and French – Etoile Du Roi and the overwhelmingly beautiful L’Hermione.
Brest was hot and busy – 712,000 people in an international jamboree of street food and trad rigs – lateeners cutting the air like something out of the Nile, squaresails and heavy stacking lug rigs wherever you looked like an old masters’ painting and the quintessential gaffers, jaunty, English-looking and smart. The effect of these festivals has a palpable feel like theatre. You get used to looking at things that just don’t occur in our modern world. Quite a lot of the people seem to have come out of another century, sometimes quite a way back. Some of them look like Baldrick in the Blackadder series; tricorn hats and greasy ragged trousers but you get the feeling that maybe this is how they really are; they also often seem to have their own pewter mug and knackered spoon, as if they know that sharing cutlery might just give them the plague.
You don’t get many straight-on double-breasted yachtsmen here but that’s the joy of being an old gaffer – the clothes, even a fishing smock and those canvas-like Curry trousers get you into this amorphous maritime club, where a love of the sea and its historical significance is simply celebrated. Thus did our English village become a part of this event of parts.
And I think we acquitted ourselves well. We had the skills on show that make it possible to keep these boats afloat. The caulking, the wirework, the woodwork, the rope-making all played a worthy role. We noticed that the other countries’ villages were noticeably absent in any display like this. And we did hear that as a criticism, mainly from the French, that apart from us and the boatbuilders over at Chantier Guip on the next quay there was not as much technical knowhow (of traditional techniques) on show, as there had been in the past.
But you couldn’t imagine that anyone was too fussed about that; the boats were here and their wacky salty crews were in the bars or sculling lazily-fast across the little basins where you could just relax the gaze and be in that other century, but in summer-lit full-pallette colour this time.
Will we ever see a festival like that over here? In Brexit-Burdened Blighty it seems as far off as it’s possible to be. But I’d love to help out if it happened. DH
Will we ever see a festival like that over here?
In Brexit Blighty it seems as far off as possible.
But I’d love to help if it happened
Image: Hard at work in the British Vilalge, Brest 2016
From issue 11 August September 2016