Renf

Checking through the most recent photos on my camera, I find one of what appears to be a portable lavatory built from doors of various shapes and sizes nailed together in haphazard fashion. The structure seems to be in a field. The photograph was taken on Saturday the 4th of May, and while it's sort of familiar, I don't know what I'm looking at or where I was when I took the picture.

The image apparently settles into my thoughts, and three mornings later I wake to a sudden recollection of having taken it at a Renaissance Fair, an event Wikipedia describes thus:

An outdoor weekend gathering, usually held in the United States, open to the public and typically commercial in nature, which purportedly recreates a historical setting for the amusement of its guests. Some are permanent theme parks, while others are short-term events in a fairground, winery, or other large public or private spaces. Renaissance fairs generally include an abundance of costumed entertainers or fair-goers, musical and theatrical acts, art and handicrafts for sale, and festival food. Some offer camp grounds for those who wish to stay more than one day. Many Renaissance fairs are set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England. Some are set earlier, during the reign of Henry VIII, or in other countries, such as France, and some are set outside the era of the Renaissance.

I am familiar with the general concept through a well-meaning but slightly headachey facebook acquaintance, another Englishman living in Texas who frequently posted pictures of himself dressed either as a character from Star Trek or as some sort of Viking, the latter being the guise he adopts when attending Renaissance Fairs. Also through certain persons of my wife's acquaintance.
 

The certain persons of my wife's acquaintance were forever trying to encourage her to come along with them to a Renaissance Fair. It's such fun, they all pleaded, usually referring to the event as a Ren Fair, because who can be bothered with all those extra syllables? Certainly not me, and I shall accordingly employ the term Renf from here on so as to additionally save time which I might eventually need in discussion of matters other than adults who dress up as Elsa from Frozen.

The Renaissance was a period of European history which I tend to regard as primarily Italian, that being where it seems to have enjoyed its most dramatic florescence. Clearly its influence was felt in England, albeit to an arguably lesser extent. The English setting of your typical Renf may therefore seem a slightly esoteric choice, but I suppose it's because everyone can already speak English, and a few can even do the accent, having seen Cumberbatch on the telly, or having grown up reading Mighty Thor comics wherein characters regularly address each other as my liege. This nevertheless still leaves us with the question of why bother?

The intellectual basis of the Renaissance was its version of humanism, derived from the concept of Roman Humanitas and the rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy, such as that of Protagoras, who said that Man is the measure of all things. This new thinking became manifest in art, architecture, politics, science and literature. Early examples were the development of perspective in oil painting and the recycled knowledge of how to make concrete. Although the invention of metal movable type sped the dissemination of ideas from the later fifteenth century, the changes of the Renaissance were not uniformly experienced across Europe: the very first traces appear in Italy as early as the late thirteenth century, in particular with the writings of Dante and the paintings of Giotto.

Or it could just be some need to express one's inner Elsa from Frozen in an accepting and non-judgemental atmosphere in the company of like-minded individuals. We were going to find out, because Bess had heard that there was to be a Renf here in San Antonio, only a small Renf but crucially one which wasn't charging admission.

There was a concern that we might run into certain persons of my wife's acquaintance dressed as Elsa from Frozen, which would be awkward, obliging us to converse whilst refraining from comment upon the manifest absurdity of the other party, but most of them would probably be attending the much bigger Renf in Austin, so it seemed like a chance worth taking.

We drove to the other side of town, then down a winding track onto what resembled common land, overgrown but with rusting sections of gate thrust up from the grass here and there. It felt as though we had left the city, and then began to feel as though we had left the twenty-first century, at least until the Renf came into view with all of its artificial fibres in iridescent colours which aren't to be found in nature. Tents and canopies of conspicuously contemporary design were arranged around an uneven circular green drooping down the hillside towards a knackered looking house, and we guessed we were in what had once been its grounds. We followed the track around hedges and between sprawls of mesquite trees. Here and there it opened up to a patch of irregularly parked vehicles, but no available spaces. Eventually we found one behind the house. The last time we had driven anywhere this rustic, tiny cages too small for the wild hogs they held prisoner had been visible between the trees and the trailer homes.

The Renf was mostly manned by persons dressed as Elsa from Frozen, seven or eight stalls, trinkets and jewellery, and nothing which seemed to warrant a closer look. The stallholders outnumbered the attendees from what we could see. A man in a kilt stood at the entrance to the house. He had a guitar and was singing songs about the auld country and how he did see a maiden fair, which had been a long time ago before the verb to see had acquired a past tense. Bess and myself entered the house where we did see a number of oil paintings, most of them for sale. I recall some of them as having been quite nice. Bess recalls them as having been mostly awful. Neither of us can remember what any of them looked like, or anything else about them. The house was seemingly owned by an artists collective, so I suppose it was their Renf.

Back outside, we passed what appeared to be a portable lavatory built from doors of various shapes and sizes nailed together in haphazard fashion - apparently the only thing worth a photograph. Just beyond the portable lavatory was some sort of jousting event conducted on foot rather than horseback and making use of genuine mediaeval styrofoam tubes as weaponry. Opposite the jousting we did see a man dressed as a knave with a mystery box. The idea was that you should pay a dollar to see what's in his mystery box, if you really give that much of a shit, which we didn't.

By now we had experienced half of what the Renf had to offer, having travelled a full semicircle about the green which we didst see when first we arrived in our marvellous horseless carriage. A steampunk woman now approached us. She wore a seventeenth century petticoat, aviator goggles, and a top hat embellished with cogs and flywheels - all sprayed bronze, because really, it's all about the dressing up box and the rosy nostalgia with which we recall such happy childhood memories from before our lives became weighed down with responsibilities and expectations, before we grew up to recognise ourselves as useless generic consumers of product, before self awareness forced us to recategorise our collective neoteny as somehow quirky and delightful, a sign of character.

Unimpressed by the most indubitably delightful perambulation of that bronzed personage, we headed back towards the house. The petting zoo was mostly chickens caged in cages not much bigger than themselves and arranged outside under full sun in the midday Texas heat. The smell was eye-watering. Beyond the petting zoo was a book stall, but all of the books were self-published by the same author, volumes of poetry and an ongoing series of novels about dragons. The author was dressed as Elsa from Frozen.

The entire excursion took about ten minutes and was shite, but I'm sure a proper Renf must be a quite different affair, with everyone dressed like Elsa from Frozen or Asterix the Gaul and addressing each other as my liege in that hilarious Austin Powers voice.

Oh behaaave, my liege.

Ha ha.

Fucking brilliant.

What a shame that I shall never know.