#57 Completed – What do Flemish Roman Catholics and Onesie-wearing marbles players have in common?

Answer was kind of in the title – they both helped me knock off #57 – attend a traditional festival.

So it was Good Friday, and as all avid sports fans know, it’s the British and World Marbles Championships.

Conveniently, the location of this annual event just happens to be at The Greyhound pub just over the border into Sussex – an easy drive for a Surrey boy like myself.

On arrival I was due a huge shock. A chap dressed as a cow bellows ‘ALJ!’ towards my direction. I realise that this speaking bovine creature was a mate of mine, Tim withhom I used to work at the Nutfield Priory Hotel. He was there with his brother and a few other guys to form a team of onesie-wearing marbles players.

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Turns out the game of marbles needs 6 players. I was devastated to learn such news. Borrowing my kangaroo onesie from Kristy (check out #23), I could have been that extra player! Alas, I was given the duties of beer boy and volunteered to get the round in for the guys whilst they prepared for their game.

If you’ve never seen marbles, go see it! It’s great. There are a few variants of the game but this one involves a number of marbles being placed right in the middle of a ring 6ft in diameter. Using your own marble, you must flick these centre marbles off the ring to score points. The team with the most marbles kicked off the ring wins. Okay, there are a load more rules and regs, read them here.

Anyways, the boys got playing against a team who looked a lot more professional than themselves. The guys were there more to have a laugh and to make everyone else laugh than for serious sport. But to everyone’s (and especially their own) surprise, they won their opening game 8 – 4. In fact they ended up coming 5th out of 16 teams. Fair play.

Inspired, I most certainly was. Hopefully I can form a team for next year to continue this great tradition.

One irritating thing though: I had to leave very early on in the day as I had a train to catch. Not a regular train for passengers above ground, but one for motor vehicles, below ground.

My parents had invited me to go with them over to Bruges in Belgium for Easter. Sounded like a good idea to me.

One of the conditions of coming with them, was to accompany them to a very different kind of festival – the Roman Catholic festival in a Flemish church called Passwake.

I think Passwake literally means ‘the wake of Easter’ as it is a service the day before. I suppose akin to Christmas Eve services.

This was as new for them as for me. Being Anglican, we knew very little about such services and we knew we were going to struggle to know much during it seeing as it will all be in Flemish (Belgian Dutch).

We were taken by some friends at Mum and Dad’s English speaking Bruges Church who, in return for our offer of attendance, kindly gave us a dinner of veal prior to the proceedings.

My advice for non-religious people, always have a look inside a church if you can, because what something looks like on the outside can be completely different to the interior. On entering the Catholic church, that looked pretty plain on the outside, I was astounded with the amount of paintings on every wall, it could have been a national art gallery.

The service got going and of course I had no idea what was going on. Thankfully, however, all the service sheets offered the sheet music so you could work out roughly what to sing and not look completely foreign to the events.

Then, all of a sudden, before the priest had arrived. All the lights were turned off. We were left with the small parts of radiation filtering through the windows high above us. These were enough to see the white of the cassock float through the hall and begin a cauldron of fire.

Slowly light was restored to the venue and we were all invited to light our own candles and hold them for a segment of the service. There is something innately spiritual about fire, something to do with the way that it always draws in your eye with fascination.

Another interesting part of the service was the fact that we moved beyond the screen to another set of seating for collection, being showered in water from some leaves as we entered and given communion as we departed.

During the prayer section, it was nice of the priest to acknowledge our sore thumb presence with an English prayer for the new Archbishop of Canterbury.

And before long, it was all finished and we were being given glasses of wine among a very chatty congregation. For a first Catholic service, I think the Flemish Passwake festival will be a difficult act to follow.

So, there we are. Two very different festivals but traditional nonetheless. Passwake dating possibly over a millenia and the Marbles dating back potentially 5 hundred years, but definitely since the 1930s at least. I like traditions.