The October plenty Festival

October Plenty is an Autumn harvest celebration held annually in Southwark. Beginning on the Bankside, by Shakespeare's Globe, October Plenty mixes ancient seasonal customs and theatre with contemporary festivity, joining with historic Borough Market, Southwark.

October Plenty is a collective celebration of the seasons, weather and food, in a public place, with access to everyone. The event is free, and happens whatever the weather.

The next October Plenty will be on Sunday 28 October 2007

The vendors have been there a good while by the time I make my entrance into the hustle and bustle of market life. Soon I am drawn into the frenetic hubbub of market cries, visual cornucopia and people –f there for work, pleasure, curiosity, or like myself, for a more obscure reason.

The bakers arrange their wholemeal baps and fine-grade boules in a variegated tessellation whilst batches of the infamous ‘walnut and pear’ are snatched up as quickly as they are out of the oven.

The red-nosed Somerset cider makers have visibly drunk their profits already. Yet merrily enough, the rotund fellows prepare barrels and wash tankards with content looks and joyful whistles.

The fishmongers have evidently woken at the crack of dawn to artistically place their hake, John Dory, and red mullet amongst a sea of frisÈes and lemon slices.

Though a theatre of exuberance to be seen and experienced, I shun these bountiful stalls. I know full well I’ll find my trophy amongst the overflowing fruit and vegetables.

Laid out before me are trolleys and crates, baskets, sacks and even paper bags laden with dismembered body parts:

Tubers and rhizomes – gnarled geriatric knuckles – are incomparable with slender carrot fingers I spy on a corner stand. Yet my attention is easily superseded: a display of pumpkin breasts vie for attention in sizes from pert to pendulous.

Across a stall where punnets teeter high, the glazed stare of gooseberries and blackberries blank me through lashless eyes, whilst cherries and greengages bundled side by side seem to ogle as if I were the spectacle.

Adjacent to the hairy runner beans, a peepshow unravels – tomatoes and radishes disrobe, revealing themselves as bulbous warts and pendulous varicose veins. Squeamish of such sights, I likewise glance away from similar dismembered unmentionables (otherwise known as cucumbers and quinces.)

Finally, I am left breathless by a vision to behold: a platter of severed heads taking pride of place, nestled among cabbages and spinach glistening with diamond tiaras of dew. Indeed, the enormous harvest display features dismembered body parts that would make any green man cringe.

Placing my purchases on the counter, the cashier doesn’t seem agitated by the dissected limbs that pass into my haversack. She’s obviously seen it all before. Besides, I can’t help but think that all the greengrocers here have a bloodthirsty look in their eyes. I’d even chance upon this racket being called Sweeney Todd’s of Borough High Street as I know for a fact they make pies out of the produce they sell here!

With a knowing wink I was greeted with a “Tha’ll be twen’y fif’ee ta you.” And then more surprisingly:

“For Oc’oba Plen’y? Though’ sa. Bring ova ‘arf darn’ I. Such a larf, ‘spec’ly tha’ bird ya make. “Corney Queeney” ya call ’er. Lav i’ wen ya pull ‘er apar’. I always try an’ grab one o’ ‘er woppas. I lav melon!”

Cripes, my cover really was blown!

***

My mission certainly was to get a deal on body parts, but for a Corne Queene (an effigy not dissimilar to that of the wicker man). Heavily laden down with seasonal produce, the figure is a representation of the harvest and fertility itself, and is utilised to represent the October Plenty Harvest Festival that takes place in the Borough each year.