Episode 19
Nostalgia? A folk festival, the Horizon, and a weeping virgin
I have a cough and a cold.
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Stella Maris Iterum
So this is the first week in my adult life that I haven’t been home to Broadstairs Folk Week during August.
For those that don’t know, Folk Week is a traditional folk music and dance festival. You can find the folk at the beach in the pavilion, impromptu sea shanties on the pier, circus skills and performers on the sands.
It’s in the town’s historic Crampton Tower and the modern Baptist Centre, as well as in every pub and cafe on High Street. There’s usually 70 plus events a day, and most of them are free. It really is a festival like no other. And of course growing up around there as a teenager, you could spend all day and all night, chain smoking and drinking on the beach, in the park, or at a venue.
I had a lot of great times. But what I really wanted to talk about, was the idea of going home for this festival. Because when I first moved to South West London 15 years ago, I would have said that it was a place that I escaped from. When I was doing my GCSEs or AS levels, I don’t remember which, my English teacher, Mr Ratcliffe, described Broadstairs, or rather the Isle of Thanet, where it is located, as like the Isle of the Tempest.
You’re either born there or you wash up on its shores never to leave. Which of course is a cheery thing to say to a 16 or 17 year old. But again, let’s talk about home. There’s no place like home. You can travel the world, but the thing that you’re looking for is usually found at home. Home is not a place, it’s a feeling.
My friend says that home is the place in the world that they have to let you in if you knock on the door in a storm. T. S. Eliot said, home is where one starts from. Now, I’m not sure But these, to me, feel and sound like platitudes. Perhaps I am suffering from nostalgia, in its truest meaning of the word.
Nostos, or homesickness.
But can this really be true? At 33, the place that I fought so hard to escape from is drawing me home. Perhaps Mr Ratcliffe was right, for those that were born and grew up in London, like Eve, the star of City’s All. But Thanet, and Broadstairs, with its cliffs, the sea, the sky, the stars, feels like a real place, much more real than London, weirdly.
But as I sit here and record this podcast, I’m thinking to myself, perhaps I’m talking bollocks, because it’s also a place of grey skies and sideways rain, and despite what the hipsters will tell you, Margate certainly isn’t, and will ever be, Shoreditch on Sea. It’s also funny that the artists that I know that want to move or have moved to Margate, have only ever been in the summer.
Walk up the high street on Christmas or Boxing Day, and I think you’ll change your mind about moving there. But despite all that, as Ptolemy’s Geography says, Telliapis, a small island on the east coast of Albion, opposite the country of Trinibantes. Or, it is Tannitus, the Island of Light. Or alternatively, Ynys Thanatos, or the Isle of the Dead.
I prefer the former, whose Welsh Gaelic etymology means fire, or bonfire, and height. This is suggestive of a lighthouse, or a burning cliff. And I grew up 10 minutes walk from North Falkland Lighthouse. It is the northernmost point on the southeast of England. It’s a point where the channel meets the North Sea.
And growing up in Broadstairs, There was a bookshop, now a pub, that’s also a bookshop, called the chapel. It was the shrine of Our Lady, Star of the Sea. A building dating back to at least the 1350s, however, there was a shrine known to have existed on the site in 1070. The shrine of Our Lady of Bradstow. A statue of the Virgin Mary, mounted on a tall column, position so that she faced seaward.
It is known that most coastal towns and villages displayed some kind of beacon on the high points of their coastline as a warning against the potential hazards known locally to shipping. Thus the medieval times this chapel of Saint Mary was known as the chapel of blue light, for a light was given into the dark seas through a blue glass lantern.
It was also not without its miracles. At some stage, the statue was placed inside the chapel, and thereafter, local seamen came to refer to it as the Weeping Virgin. Hot weather, it is said, to have caused humidity and the condensation in the chapel, which settled on the face of the Virgin, and caused the figure to appear to weep.
This effect was considered by the religious mariners as a bad omen. As a storm would often follow and thus the atmospheric changes indicated in the chapel was a good rough guide to those who would face the perils of the sea. And in fact the motto of Broadstairs as a town is simply Stella Maris. And perhaps that’s what I miss the most about home, is the horizon.
The star of the ocean, and the portal of the sky.
Permanently Moved
Permanently Moved (dot) Online is a quarterly audio personal podcast, written, recorded and edited by by @thejaymo
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