(i) Introduction: The purple prose poetic bit
A bitter cold and a Baltic breeze flog the skin raw under a lukewarm sun. You look to the sky for warmth, but there is none. It stares back at you with an icy blue gaze that leaves scratch marks in the back of your eyes and icicles in your heart. On the Coventry road in Birmingham, men wander around in white skull caps that look like bald heads in the long distance. Their sallow margarine cheeks sprouting with bristles and their womenfolk walking in troops, slicing through the icy front dressed in svelte garbs that sway like sails. An armada of pushchairs, with little red nosed occupants, ply though the rubbish strewn street; pass the walls dunked in apple crumble and clotted with snails that look like tumours. They stop and ponder in front of bold stickers announcing cheap meal deals - good wholesome food for the little en's - who are more interested in the balloons next door.
The gardens no longer daubed with the sweet smell of frangipani, honeysuckle and dandelion but with the rough strokes of a wintry brush. The creepers have fled on summer holiday and the insects are languishing in Italy. The boughs tremble while their jaundiced leaves lie crumpled on the boggy earth; crunchy under your feet. It feels good when you walk over them; their muffled screams acting like shock absorbers when you crush them with your soles.
Winter, with its capricious moods and anaemic colours seems a poor child to the theatricals of the wedding hall. You watch, with straight faced sobriety, the wedding jesters marching in. A fanfare of reds, blues and greens from a medieval playhouse. You spot the bouffant haired ‘troubadours’ with their drums, the ‘prima donnas’ holding court in histrionic airs, the brides ‘troupe’ and the rest all ‘jokers’ and ‘clowns’ – all cutting a dash in an assortment of affected razmadazz.
It appears all so antiquated don’t you think? All rather odd against the backdrop of the red-bricked hovels they call homes and the bright yellow of ‘Morrisons’ – beaming at you like a good friend. A people wallowing in a past that no longer wants them; edged towards a future they’re afraid of. The wedding hall, a squat double storey building sitting on its haunches and looking rather glum in an area paved with low aspirations; like the figures skulking around its edges and meddling in the cracks. Off the radar – off the grid. In never never land.
The men inside monosyllabic and vacuous. Products of blissful ignorance and drudgery; inert philistines with brains minced through a food processor. You’re harassed by the regular mob with ‘get rich quick schemes’ and unabashedly quizzed on the latest tax scams. As if you would know. Luckily, the womenfolk downstairs are more salubrious and more then happy to have you. With hair done up in strange bobs and curtains. Smiles as wide as oceans. Sequined headscarves wrapping pretty little heads that bob with animated conversation. And cheeks like cranberries but that much sweeter.
(Continued...)
(Copyright: Global Anthropology Journal 2007)
