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13

To everything there is a season

A mountain of courgettes. A heap of apples. A pile of peas. A hill of beans.

Summer and early autumn are ripe and luscious. In a good year – for even small-scale gardeners – there’s too much to consume, which precipitates a flurry of freezing, pickling and preservation.

Yes, you can eat these all year round, plucked from supermarket shelves. But there’s a delight in having to wait for the season to turn up, watching fruit and veg grow daily more plump and glossy, until that final moment when they’re just right for table.

‘To everything there is a season’, says the ancient author of Ecclesiastes – whose ruminations were turned into a song, ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’ by the folk singer Pete Seeger, and then made into a hit by the Byrds in 1965. There’s ‘a time to plant, a time to reap’, Ecclesiastes goes. ‘A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.’

Harvest is a signal for feasting and festivity – born out of a year’s laborious preparation: digging, tilling, feeding, waiting, weeding and protection.

Almost every celebration of any kind is all the sweeter when it comes out of a time of testing. A welcome pint after a hard week, or a decent lie-in after a run of broken nights. They’re important tags, a way of saying anything from ‘We did it!’, to ‘Phew, I’m glad that’s over!’

Every year, Muslims mark Eid – an eruption of feasting that’s been anticipated during the thirty days fasting of Ramadan. Jews think carefully about what delicacies they’ll consume after the penitent fast of Yom Kippur. For Sikhs, the New Year festival of Baisakhi (or Vaisakhi) originally grew out of the harvest festivities in the Punjab. In the Christian calendar, the Easter festival emerges from the sombre forty days of Lent.

Life needs peaks to follow troughs: the first day of the school summer holidays; the clink of glasses that mark a birth; the fierce welcome hug at the airport arrivals gate; the first night’s sleep back in your own bed.

Celebrations – whether they’re religious or not – are holy moments. Holidays. They’re like bookmarks telling us where we’ve got up to. They’re an essential way of recognising that something significant has been achieved, of saying thank you to friends, family, teammates, the divine... whoever.

In a festive pause, we look one another in the eye, we repeat old stories, we raise a glass, we celebrate the past, and the present, and look to the future.