Feasts, Festivals and Friends

Never let it be said that life in a seemingly fast asleep fishing village, content to sit out it's old age, can ever be boring or dull; with it's nocturnal wanderings and silent intrigue, where one persons drama becomes the vine of gossips delight. Sleep it may, but village life continues as each generation melts into the pot of yesterday; with the feasts and festivals of today remembered through the photographs and videos hidden in the drawers of tomorrow. We watch as we celebrate the life and colour of the village, its people, its traditions and its past; last week we enjoyed and endulged in the fish, fun filled Herring Festival with its smoked, soused, rollmop, baked, grilled, fried, bloatered and net fresh herrings, silver darlings, unrivalled kings of the sea. They come swimming down through the Irish sea year after year visiting our bay, their breeding bay, where they will spawn, beginning again the seven year life cycle that brings them back from whitebait to fully mature fish.
The festival was a day marinaded in atmosphere as people came to delight, taste and take home some fine fare, from fishcakes to fillets, from cider to cheese, even the local television came to cover the day. It is through events such as these that we learn to see the village built on fish by men and women brought up on fish; the lives of one dependent on the existance of the other. We know of some families still in Clovelly whose ancestors came here because of the sea and the
herring, stayed because of the sea and the herring and remain thanks to the sea and the herring. My own family surviving five generations as mariners and herring men. For over 20 years I have been a herring man. Today people make Clovelly their home for different reasons, having little understanding of the seasonal fishery, unaware of the night long boats drifting across the tide of the lantern lit bay, the shaking of the fishful nets in the cold, still air of the harbour, leaving the pebbled beach slippery and glistening with silver scales; where once donkeys laboured through the pannier and basket laden night. Boats no longer land the great shoals, picarooners don't line the shore, the smell of tanned nets no more hang drying from the wall. For most those days are long passed, for me it is a past still alive and will remain as long as there are still some herring being landed.
When I sit alone at sea in the cold, dark night, gently rocking with the Southerly swell, looking back at the Christmas lit village; I think of those fast asleep houses, unaware of their past and when it's time to haul in the nets, watching the fish come aboard, I think of all the men gone now and how hard it was for them as they often toiled with their heavy nets and I wonder will I be one of the last.
With the nets hauled, fish counted, customers supplied and satisfied all that remains to do is the most important part of the season; with fish and car I head into Devons hinterland, knocking, calling, visiting and surprising my most favourite people, those who have bought herring from me over the last 20 years, those who have eaten herring all their lives, who remember their parents salting in herring for the Winter, those who tell stories of herring for breakfast and herring for tea, whose lives are richer for the taste and goodness of Clovelly herring and my life shall never be boring or dull only richer for the knowing of them all.