Some Things Are Hard To Find...

Bank holiday weekends normally follow a familiar pattern. They consist of an alcohol tinged cycle of replacement bus services, eight-hour marathon lunches with the in laws and unwittingly getting sunburnt. Their sole purpose - certainly for those unfortunate enough to inhabit that formless and unforgiving world of work - is to diminish the working week by 20%. For many, myself included, the best part of the Bank Holiday is going into work on Tuesday having already completed the worst day of the week.

This May Day however, I decided to throw caution and boredom to the wind in search of the best England's fecund rurality had to offer. Accompanied by my skeptical but ever-enthusiastic girlfriend, I trundled off to the Cambridgeshire village of Stilton to indulge in the perfectly idiosyncratic May Day tradition of cheese rolling. This basically involves some inebriated locals dressing up and embarrassing their children by competitively hurling replica Stilton's down a shallow slope. A simple premise, and one which was sure to reinforce the futility of doing anything whatsoever of consequence on a Bank Holiday.

The day was bright blue, the sun keenly getting back to work after its recent six-month sabbatical. We arrived at the village through a maze of incandescent yellow rapeseed fields and sinewy country paths, and were greeted by several excited residents, skins faded and bloated to resemble a family of boiled eggs, waddling to the centre of town where the frivolities were being nonchalantly set in motion.

The event itself was underwhelming; the highlight undoubtedly being the winning team of pock-marked teenagers, apparently in some sort of band. They were the kind of youths who are too big for their frames, and so are always awkwardly stooping, lanky arms stuffed in pockets like Rodney Trotter. In the ultimate competition of uncool, these beanpoles received some serious credibility damaging press as their prize of a whole Stilton cheese was drawlingly presented amid villagers' guttural cheers by a midget named Warwick.

Interspersed with some ferret-racing, maypole-dancing and general country knee-slapping, the festival for me represented a quintessential English fixation with tradition. Although the event itself is now redundant as a spectacle, it is the adherence to custom that brings people out into the glaring sunshine and draws them together as a hastily composed community.

Such a percievably anachronistic practice is bound to attract two kinds of reaction from city-dwellers. The first - and least condescending - is the view that such behavior from rural England is quaint, if not a little stagnant in terms of an event.

The second - and I would venture that many people secretly hold this point of view - sees such behaviour as a backwards, even toffish celebration of prosperous country folk; the villagers are so smugly content with a life free from hardship and fractiousness that they have the time to dick about with dairy products.

This goes hand in hand with the assumption that city life, due to its inherent industrial, technological and infrastructural proficiency, is slicker, quicker and hence more enlightened than the slow-paced countryside. Outgoing Mayor Ken Livingstone would periodically extol London's enviable 'multiculturalism', like an intermittent bout of populist wind. In London, where knife crime is soaring and different ethnic groups are becoming increasingly secularised, there seems to be little of the communal cohesion that any politician worth his salt will claim to believe in.

That is not to say that the villagers of Stilton finished the day's celebrations by holding hand and dancing peacefully round a campfire. There were still various and conflicting demographics at work and, in the balmy afternoon air awaft with hot dog smoke and candyfloss vapour, these seemed to concentrate to form a caricature of society. From my vantage point at the corner of the coconut shy, I could see single mothers struggling to shield their overweight babies from the sear of natural light. There were teenage pregnancies being paraded around with all the selfish abandon of a toddler giving her doll a haircut. There were binge-drinking and (shock and indeed horror) drug-taking teenagers dressed in their gravy stained tracksuits, causing trouble and giving some elderly residents light verbal intimidation. These crystallised fragments of society were all coexisting, but not in the Utopian sense of feeding one another grapes. They caused friction and argued, but made up without any aggression. There just wasn't any point in ruining a perfectly innocuous day. They lived together on an exceptional day, and they would have to live together in the quotidian ones that were to follow.

Villages and towns have identity, and it is an identity that their inhabitants can largely relate to. You are either born in or chose to move to a town or village, normally in search of a better quality of life. Few people who live in London originally come from London, and this, coupled with the poorly integrated native and immigrant populations make it difficult to see the capital as any one's spiritual home. What's more, those in power seem intent on pushing this panacea of multiculturalism to the annihilation of any sense of locality. If London represents the world - as it apparently should do - then where in the world do you come from? Community spirit is not sufficient motivation to get on with one another; there are enough other people around who you don't know, don't want to know, so why should you make an effort to get to know?

May Day celebrations such as in Stilton attest that, rurally at least, a great deal of national pride abounds alongside a sense of social cohesion. All classes, races and ages were in the village centre that day, no doubt the type of integration that many ministers claim to strive towards on a daily basis.

I fully realise that it is neither helpful or practical to compare a village with the country's most populous city, but part of the problem with London's divisiveness comes from it's own snobbishness and self importance. It is the biggest, arguably the best and that all too often precipitates its inhabitants into carrying with them a sense of superiority over their neighbour. Rather than sharing any common ground, Londoners prefer to keep it to themselves.

Stilton wasn't being backwards for rolling its eponymous produce. It was being progressive on a day of social inclusiveness and cohesion. London could do well from adopting the village's mentality of a sense of belonging - the fact that you have something in common with your neighbour, not through a shared skin colour, class or age, but simply by merit of them being your neighbour. They need to recognise that provincialism isn't parochialism.

With a full and happy weekend behind me I wearily boarded by replacement bus service back to the capital. As I alighted and set off down Blackstock Road to my house, I nearly inadvertently picked a fight with two separate men - just by looking at them. How foolish of me. How progressive and informed it is to insight rage through not looking sheepishly at the ground in response to a display of male brutishness. As I drudged home through the city of aggressive strangers, I missed the country, where I could look people in the eye without getting punched. How backward can you get?