YULE MOON POEM-DARE

In this missive:

• Musings on a women’s ball game in the streets of Kirkwall in 1945
• A POETRY DARE
• Write with me in the New Year!
• Three Unmissable End-of-Year lists

I’m writing this on Christmas morning.* It snowed in Orkney a few days ago, settling on high ground for a moment. The absolute silence and altered landscape outside of Kirkwall was an otherworldly expanse belonging only to the Norse rune, Hagall—hail—the coldest grain. The skies shifted from an enveloping darkness, seemingly static and eternal, to a windswept blue and back again and all the while ice seeded itself into the earth.

Yesterday the winds were almost 70mph—a violent storm on the Beaufort Scale, set to return at the full moon, what will be the day I post this to Substack. Kirkwall has boarded up every window and enclave. Thick wood planks are screwed into place as if for a storm, but it’s for the Ba’, a heaving, chaotic handball game played through the streets of the town. It’s a storm not of wind and sea but testosterone. A street football game is a Yule tradition in many parts of Europe dating from the Middle Ages. In Kirkwall there are matches on Christmas and New Years day and there are supposedly no rules—except you must be born in Kirkwall and be a man to participate. Two teams are demarcated by ancestry—you are either an ‘uppie’ or a ‘doonie’—where your father was born, presumably, because now everyone is born in the same hospital. I’ve heard the crush of men’s bodies in the street is so intense that steam rises from them. 

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A women’s Ba’ was played in 1945 and 1946 and immediately abolished. I keep thinking about these Orcadian women who’d just survived an apocalyptic war by doing ‘men’s’ work in order to keep civilisation going. For a day, they claimed the tribal alliances, the adrenaline, prowess and triumph inherent in the spectacle of the Ba’, and faced intense male opposition doing it. A whole posse of Abbesses of Unreason** ran through the streets and the men of Kirkwall couldn’t handle it. At one point a man stole the ball, trying to sabotage the game and the New Year’s ball had to be used. Barabara Yule, the winner of the game, took her Ba’ trophy—the ball itself—with her to Tottenham in London where she set up a grocers. Tottenham is the first place I watched women’s roller derby 18 years ago—another contact sport. I just keep thinking of Barbara Yule—aptly named—in her wool trousers and gansey, her hair in a sturdy braid, running through the streets of Kirkwall, the Ba’ tucked under her arm, all the way to London. 

[You can read the incredible story of the Women’s Ba’ up at the Orkney Museum Blog***]

The Yule Moon Poem Dare

The poem dare is not about street ball, but about a poem I wrote about Christmas in Aberdeenshire where I I was living at the time. 

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedWhen the Lights Switch On

You’ll be where the fun fair, the Prosecco van
and emergency services meet.

Spinning the wool and yoking the plough on Yule,
but even this doesn’t go unpunished.

Should old times be forgotten?
Hare chases dog; the Abbot of Unreason presides.

You carve the gyfu-rune into the church beams in secret
and light the stub of last year’s log, keeping it good and burning.

Saturnalia with the 9th legion:
hurray for the the birth of the sun,

Unconquered! Stoke the forge.
Hold the torches in formation,

chase the aurochs over the cliff
and we eat all winter.

The tongue of light hisses
into dry grass.

The current iteration of Yule is a blip in this long history of light amid darkness, and if we were to walk from one metaphorical museum diorama to another back in time—from one solstice light to the next—it might look like this.  

It’s a failed poem, mostly because I think to understand it the reader must be a history nerd, and be down with going backwards in time. It started with a poem about the modest festivities to turn the Xmas lights on throughout impoverished town in the shire where I lived. Narratives of hardship and sacrifice arrived each year with the lights: they barely raised the funds to make it happen, without donations Xmas would be dark this year, and so on. Perhaps unlike Christmas with its bloated fanfare, Yule’s solar return will come whether all the raffle tickets have been sold or not.

This is a long winded way of saying rules for jokes also apply to poems, so if I have to explain it…

I dare you: In the wonder cabinet of your mind at this very moment, take me from shelf to shelf, case to case.  What chronologies link us? I want to read your museum!

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WRITE WITH ME IN THE NEW YEAR!

Writing as Ritual, online, January 28th, at 7pm GMT.

Writing as Ritual is a two hour masterclass for people are writing for publication as well as writers who are embarking on or renewing a writing journey. (Paid subcribers get a 20% discount. Check your email inbox for the code, or comment below.)

Two End-of-Year Lists (that happen to include Ashes & Stones)

Product Magazine’s Best Non-Fiction of 2023 A terrific round up of Scottish nonfiction by the inimitable Alistair Braidwood

The 2023 Mighty Women Reading List —so chuffed to make it onto a round up with Dolly Parton, I can’t even tell you.

The Return of the Light: Actively Hopeful List from 2023 from the totally hopeful and inspiring Lighthouse Books.

*I schedule posts to go up when the moon is in phase, but I write them when I have the spoons! 

** The Abbot of Unreason is the Scottish ‘Lord of Misrule’ This old tradition is no longer kept (though perhaps it’s being revived in places?), The Abbot is a coyote/Loki-like figure elected at Yule to turn everything on its head, bringing chaos and mirth. 

*** https://orkneymuseum.wordpress.com/2020/12/30/barbara-yules-ba-75th-anniversary-of-the-womens-ba-1945-6-2020-1/

Missives from the Verge with Allyson Shaw is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.