Come to Scoff, Stay to Loaf

Are chatbots making reading pointless?  As someone who has loved reading since I was a pre-schooler, and loved being read to since I was a baby, I hate the thought of this.

But is there, for example, any point in reading a newspaper or magazine, when the editor could be saving money by having the articles written by a text-generating AI that just assembles a random selection of words that bear no relation to anything in reality?  Is there any point in asking or answering questions online, when the questions I find may not have been posted by a real person – not even by a bored, mischievous teenager trolling – and the answers I receive to my questions may not be based on anyone’s real-life experience?

So, reclusive as I am by habit, I have had to accept that if I want to be sure that what I am interacting with is a person, I need to meet people and talk to them face-to-face, and that it’s worth getting to know the people in my area better.  After all, I’ve lived in Nettlebridge for seven and a half years now, and I know only a very few of my neighbours.  Some of them are people I might wave to and say good morning to on my way to work.  Some are people I can trust enough that they’ve given me a lift to work, or been to our house for coffee.  Some have even become good friends.  But in many cases, there are just houses whose occupants I have no knowledge of.

So I decided to invite neighbours round for a Lammas party on Thursday 1st August, as Lammas seemed as good an excuse as any.  I made a set of invitations and gone around either ringing people’s doorbells to invite them in person, or, failing that, just pushing an invitation through the letterbox.  One lady I talked to, when I explained that I wanted to try to get to know my neighbours a bit better, replied that she and her husband had been living in the same place for fifty years and still didn’t know most of their neighbours.

Several people who saw the invitation at first misread it as ‘llamas party’, which is understandable, as some people around here keep llamas (though not nearly as many as keep cows or sheep, or sometimes goats), and our next-door neighbour actually does organise llama parties, paying for the upkeep of her pet llamas by charging groups of people for the experience of meeting them and taking them for a walk.

However, as I explained on the invitation, Lammas is a harvest festival in both Christian and pagan tradition.  The name means ‘loaf-mass’, the festival to celebrate the first loaf of bread made with flour from the first of this year’s grain harvest.  It is related to the words ‘lord’ (loaf-guard, the man who protects the supplies of bread) and ‘lady’ (loaf-kneader, the person who actually makes the bread).  The Anglo-Saxons didn’t expect the nobility to sit around idle!

My mum had asked whether I was going to bake my own loaf, but I don’t have a lot of experience of baking bread.  Instead, we bought two focaccia loaves (one with red onion in and one with olives) and two sourdough loaves from our favourite grocer’s shop, Christine’s in Bradford on Avon, along with spreads and nibbles from the same place, cheese and crackers and sweet chocolate biscuits from the cheese shop, summer fruits and salad from the greengrocer’s, and meat pies and a few slices of ham and turkey from the butcher’s.

I did do some baking of my own, with a coffee sponge cake, a soft, moist banana cake, and a quiche of red and yellow peppers, onion and Cheddar cheese, with a crumbly pastry of half wholemeal wheat flour and half oatbran.  I had mostly avoided baking my own cakes until spring this year, when I wanted to invite my brother-in-law to my birthday party and provide a chocolate cake that he could eat, as so many commercial chocolate cakes contain soya, which he is allergic to.

Some websites I had looked at suggested decorating for a Lammas party with vine leaves and iron farming tools.  I could have got some garden forks out of the shed, but I wanted this occasion to be as laid-back and non-weird as possible, especially for people who didn’t already know us.  Cleaning up to receive visitors did mean I put away some of the things that had been out since past celebrations, like the little Christmas-tree decoration angels, the stack of old birthday cards that should have gone in the recycling, and the painted eggshells from Easter.

While I was tidying, I noticed a packet of straw stars in the Christmas decorations box which would make perfect Lammas decorations.  So I hung them on the potted tree who stands outside our front door when he isn’t being a Christmas tree.  There was even a straw angel to go on top.  I had wondered whether to buy a rainbow-coloured papier-mâché piñata in the shape of what looked like a llama to me (though apparently it was supposed to be a donkey), as a joke, but had decided not to bother – and the spruce tree dressed up in his straw finery looked much nicer.

Having gone to the lengths of getting the vacuum cleaner out to go over the living-room rug and clear up some of the dead bees (which meant first having to ask PDB11 to remind me where we even keep the vacuum cleaner), I even went upstairs with it.  I found myself vacuuming our bedroom (not that guests were invited in there – it certainly wasn’t planned to be that sort of party), cleaning up the dust accumulated behind the thousand or so science fiction and fantasy novels lining one wall, and grooming the cuddly toy dragons who roost on top of the bookcases and don’t get nearly as many cuddles as they deserve.

We had been wondering whether a dozen people would come (about the maximum number we could find chairs for in the living room) or more.  As it turned out, we had six guests who stayed for long enough to eat and socialise.  Three were old friends of ours whom we would invite to any party anyway, and three were neighbours we’re starting to get to know better – including our next-door neighbour, who arrived slightly later as she had been busy organising a llama party.   A third three were a woman and her two children who were holding two lively small dogs by their leashes, and looked in long enough to say hello, but didn’t sit down, let alone eat anything, as the dogs were eager to get out for a walk.

So it wasn’t a frantically busy social occasion, but that was probably just as well.  PDB11 and I are still getting the hang of being sociable, and it’s easier if things are fairly low-key, even if a gathering consists of two guests listening to a third holding forth about the interesting archaeological remains he keeps finding in his garden, while a fourth guest falls asleep.

The next day, I went into work, taking with me some leftover cake to share with my colleagues, and – oh.  It’s the start of August, so, while the window display is of swimming costumes and inflatable beach toys, we’ve already put out our first consignment of Christmas cards.  They are nice cards, varying from angels and manger scenes to a cute picture of forest animals gazing at four garden forks stuck in the ground with candles fixed to them.  But it does seem unseasonable to get people thinking about Christmas when we’re only a week into the summer holidays.

It’s not as if there aren’t plenty of other festivals along the way.  It’s less than two months until Michaelmas.  I’m not sure I want to roast a goose – I’m happy to wait until Christmas for that – but as St Michael is celebrated as the archangel who conquered the Devil, and the Devil is sometimes represented as a dragon, I might have a go at baking a cake in the shape of a dragon.  I could take those model angels out of the Christmas box and put them back on the tree – and invite the dragons down from upstairs.