Maeve: Yesterdaze; or, Ulric Revolting

Yesterdaze; or, Ulric Revolting

We live in separate worlds now, thought the peasant of the princess: hers was a world of radiance, and his a world of darkness. The light always shone on her table. Sumptuous food lay like a treasure of edible jewels on the cranberry velvet; she laughs; and the goblets winked, the ruby red capon glinted. The crackling on the roast pork was like amber. He didn’t even have a platter for his blackened bread – the only thing Ulric had in plenty was liquor. He had flagons, barrels and pewter pitchers brimming with heather ale, elderberry wine and his very own mulberry mead. His stall swarmed with thirsty customers, but he was lost in dismal reflection.

A nearby Viking had clearly lost a game on his Gameboy; he howled, dropped his foam sword and his plastic helmet fell off. To his left, a Victorian urchin chatted up a nun; to his right, Anne Boleyn, clad in her red spandex and nylon ruff, seemed to be having a rather loud argument with someone on the other end of her mobile phone.

His reverie was disturbed.

“You,” the peasant droned as he doled out beer. “You’re being beheaded in five minutes, aren’t you?”

She cast a bored look in his direction, cupped the phone and hissed, ‘What, already? – Yeah, sorry ... back to work ... I’m on the block again ... talk later, yeah? Bye ...”

Still dissatisfied, the peasant sighed and hammered the table. Painted faces looked up from plastic cups.

“I’m sorry, but could you all just leave and go back to your own eras?”

This was no mishap with a time machine.

This was Yesterdaze, the travelling history re-enactment fair (“It’s Just Historical!” screamed the garish posters that plastered windows, lamp posts and toilet cubicles). It was only the most historically inaccurate renaissance festival in the country.

 If it had ever been a gentle and nostalgic step back into the past, it certainly wasn’t now. At best, gaudy and tawdry and at worst, mildly offensive, it was a money-guzzling funfair. If you had been silly enough to expect a delightful-yet-educational and authentic-but-inoffensive evening, you would be in for a massive disappointment. From the vulgar flashing lights and painted wooden castles, to the screaming children running amok with glow-in-the-dark thumbscrews and swords. In short, it was a businessman’s dream and a historian’s nightmare. At Yesterdaze, you could have your picture taken with an unusually sanguine Henry VIII.

You could eat as much as you liked at Princess Guinevere’s medieval banquet, stroll down a disease-ridden Victorian boulevard, or sample the virtual tortures of the traitors in the Tower. And then there was Ulric the Peasant’s Bubonic Bar: “Drown your sorrows! Drink yourself to Black Death!”

From April to September, the festival swarmed through the British countryside like the plague that had ravaged it so long ago. It trundled down lonely country lanes, creeping through empty fields, moors and purple crofts and filling them with flashy tents and gaudy flags, paper cups and neon glitter.

Until May, life had been sweet for Guinevere and Ulric, but by July, there was a decidedly sour taste to their relationship. Guinevere had suggested that Ulric was too fond of his mulberry mead, and in anger, he had implied that she clearly shared a similar enthusiasm for her cream pies. She started edging her banquet away from his bar until she was only just within slanging match distance.

As they swept through sun-yellowed fields to lush green meadows, the long, pink summer days began to bleed into one another, no beginning and no end; each green hill and every winding stream seemed no different as they edged from one side of the country to the other. Every day, there was the same flock of faceless people. Without Guinevere, there was no punctuation to his day.

Guinevere: or so the plastic nameplate pinned to the front of her sparkly Lurex robe would have you believe. Ulric knew better: she was only Tracey, just as he was only Steve. She was no princess, but even in a cardboard crown and plastic jewels, she was a woman of mythic beauty – well, sort of. Her hair came out of a bottle, as did her overwhelming majority of her face; but he remembered the crow’s feet that edged her eyes; the tell-tale sign of a well-seasoned smiler. That smile! People clustered around her for its radiating warmth. She had a smile for everyone, thought Ulric, everyone except me.

It must be a unanimously held thought that the last fortnight of August is one of the most dismal two weeks of the entire year – at least for summer-lovers. The vivacity of summer has packed up and has left suddenly one night with no warning; without even a goodbye note or a farewell kiss. You knew the end was inevitable, but this knowledge does not soothe the pain of her leaving. But traces of her presence linger still and torture you – her warmth hangs around in the weeks following her departure, but this warmth has not the airy, clear sweetness of July.

A familiar and detested figure appeared from the door of one of the caravans that were parked behind the stalls, decked in a plastic suit of white armour. It was young Lancelot (or James) from the Medieval Pie Company. On his shoulder he bore a tempting tray of steaming, boulder-like pies, his flaxen hair rippling crisply to his shoulder. There was the odd jibe and occasional taunt, but he only smirked; their words deflected off his armour.

Ulric’s mournful eyes had not gone unnoticed by the rest of the crew. All had their pearls of wisdom to bestow upon him.

“Do cheer up,” said Queen Victoria.

Oh, good heavens, he thought.

 “Still a bit miserable over Tracey, are you?” a unicorn had asked him, nodding knowingly over his pint of beer. “It’ll be alright, you know.”

“Plenty of fish in the sea,” said a dragon.

“No one liked her anyway,” chipped in a leprechaun. There was a mumble of agreement. They all nodded.

Henry VIII helpfully reassured him that Lancelot’s hair was “a bit girly, let’s be honest”; and Anne Boleyn noted that “she really has put on weight, hasn’t she?” and that “he isn’t even that handsome”.

Jack the Ripper insisted he keep his “chin up” and added that “she’s not worth it”; a group of Norman knights drunkenly informed him that Lancelot was a “prat with a stupid haircut” and “definitely, definitely a step down from you”; Mary Queen of Scots kept fluttering her eyelashes at him – and it was universally agreed upon that she was “a bit old for you, mate”.

But still he couldn’t stop his eyes from straying over to Guinevere’s banquet. Their table was rich not only in food too beautiful to eat, but in laughter, smiles and light. Standing in the shadow of wizened trees was the table of the poor, of the peasants, of disease, of the Great Plague. He suddenly felt the deep injustice of medieval society: to have two worlds living side by side – a tiny one of castles and silks and lutes and gammon; and another, far vaster one of cold cottages and muddy fingernails and empty stomachs and gruelling hard work and oozing pustules. I am a peasant, thought Ulric mawkishly – I’m suffering from a poverty of love.

He couldn’t stop looking over his tankard to the table of the rich: it hurt him to do so, to watch her so untroubled, so oblivious to his sad eyes, but it was a strange craving. With a jolt, he watched Lancelot share a joke with Guinevere, a joke lost on his ears. His veins were now pulsating with the foul poison of jealousy, coursing through his body. It was a feeling which physically pained him, shook his hands and knees, tore his nerves apart. He wondered if the other peasants with their prosthetic pustules could hear the shriek of his mind; it was a shriek so ear-splitting that it woke the terrible beast that lay dormant within him. The beast which slumbers within everyone. Far more dangerous than any medieval fire-breathing dragon.