welfth Night is a strange one. January 5th or 6th. Time to take down the decorations and end the holiday season.
Twelfth Night marks the day when the Three Kings came to visit the baby Jesus. In Ireland, and in some parts of Italy, models of the Three Kings are added to the Nativity cribs on Twelfth Night.
The Kings kneeling before the baby in the stable follows the pattern of reversals that midwinter festivals celebrated in pre-Christian times.
The Roman Saturnalia and the Celtic festival Samhain both honour a Lord of Misrule. The period of the festival overturns the normal strict hierarchies of class, wealth and gender. The Italians at carnival time call it il mondo reverso – the world turned upside down. High becomes low, low becomes high, women tell the men what to do, and there’s plenty of cross-dressing too.
The Catholic Church was genius at grafting its own religious occasions onto existing non-Christian festivals and Twelfth Night was part of the retro-fit.
In Shakespeare’s time, Twelfth Night was an important feast. Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night dramatises the tradition of reversals – a girl dressed as a boy, a servant who fancies his chances with a high-born lady, a shipwreck where the past is swept away. The chaotic pantomime of the Dark House.
Pantomimes themselves – staple Christmas entertainment – always have a cross-dressed dame, and an ordinary lad or lassie who will become the prince or princess, plus a few villains made to eat dust.
There’s a beautiful poem by T. S. Eliot called ‘The Journey of the Magi’. It’s about the Three Kings making their way to the Christ Child – and questioning what happened – what was it they had witnessed? Was it a birth? Or a death?
The birth of the Christ Child heralds the death of an existing order.
That’s the thing with reversals – and you can find this principle in all the fairy tales too, some reversal of fortune, or circumstances, rags to riches, riches to rags, an end that is really a beginning, a brave new world that is only an animated necropolis, the loss of something precious that allows us to find the treasure that is really there.
The reversal of any fixed situation allows a new possibility to present itself.
Twelfth Night is also known as Epiphany. Epiphany means ‘manifestation’. Something is revealed. And what is revealed will be a challenge to the old order.
We hear a lot about disruptive start-ups, like Uber, or Airbnb, challenging the existing order. We’re told this is creative and necessary. Maybe it is.
My feeling is that we could do with more stability in our outward-facing lives so that we could risk disruption to our inner lives; our thinking, feeling, imaginative lives.
When we’re just like the animals, concentrating on food, territory, survival, mating, being the leader of the pack, then what is the point of being human?
The sad truth is that no political system (and capitalism is a political system) has succeeded in providing most of us with the basics we need, so that we have some freedom to explore what might be happening in the 98 per cent of our brains that we don’t use.
That looks like failure to me.
Epiphany is an inspired reversal of power structures and hierarchies, of class systems and the status quo, a reminder that the way we live is propositional: we made it this way – we could remake it in a different way.
The Kings kneel before something bigger than authority – they are kneeling before a possible future, one based on love, not fear; one where there is abundance and not lack.
We know that what follows in the Bible story is King Herod’s slaughter of every male child under two years old – his blood-soaked effort to hold on to power, to rigidly enforce what is, and wipe out what will be.
But the child he wants is already gone, wrapped in his mother’s arms, trotting across the desert to his destiny.
There is always another chance.
And us?
We’ve got the ersatz version of Follow Your Star – but what happens when the star leads us to a wormy, dungy stable in a crummy town and we’re wearing our best clothes and expecting applause and instead we have to kneel down in the straw and give our gifts (the best of us) to something we don’t understand?
Quest stories and gaming make it seem so simple – challenges, monsters, setbacks, and then success. The trouble is that the real quest doesn’t have an end, or a happy-ever-after, or a series of moves to follow. A commitment to being conscious, to being creative – whatever that means to you – a commitment to love, a desire for change; that is a life’s work.
Stars lead us where they will. What we do when we arrive at the unexpected destination is up to us.
Journeys need food. I love fish, and these easy fishcakes can be left to cool and taken as a packed lunch or picnic supper. Or eat them hot and delicious with home-made mayo or your own tomato sauce.
I don’t put potato in my fishcakes because I like eating them with chips. If you want a light and nutritious meal, try these with a squeeze of lemon or lime and a big bowl of seasonal salad. Or a plate of hot buttered cabbage.
YOU NEED
Quantity of mixed fish – this depends on how many fishcakes you fancy. I use a mixture of fresh cod and salmon with about 20 per cent smoked haddock. If you don’t like smoked haddock, leave it out. I’ve tried these with cod and small shrimp. Pretty good.
Chopped onion – not too much, enough to give flavour
Eggs. Eggs work as the binder as you’re not using potato.
Breadcrumbs made with day-old bread
Flour
Flat-leaf parsley
Salt and pepper
METHOD
The key here is that these fishcakes are small – too big and fat and the fish won’t cook through. Bigger fishcakes with potato need you to cook the potato and fish first – we’re not doing that. So think small.
Chop up the fish small and the onion smaller.
Mix together in a big bowl and add the egg or eggs so that you have a viscous mixture. Add parsley and seasoning.
Put some flour onto a board. Using both hands, shape little flat fishcakes, then pat each side into the flour to hold together, and then pat each side into the breadcrumbs.
As you make each one put it aside on a big plate. Make sure each little fishcake is firm.
Chill in the fridge for an hour if you can. If not . . .
Heat sunflower oil in a pan – get it good and hot and slide the fishcakes in one by one, turning after 4 minutes.
If you want to make a tomato sauce you’ll need to do that ahead. The recipe below is very simple and just as good for pasta or rice as it is for fishcakes.
Take some biggish tomatoes with a good flavour and skin them by placing in a big pan of hot water for about half an hour.
Heat some olive oil in a heavy pan and add a bit of garlic. I add onion but you don’t have to. I add a fresh red chilli too sometimes, depending on how I feel and if I have one.
When the garlic, onion and chilli are softened, add your peeled, coarse-chopped tomatoes and stir it all around. At this stage I sometimes put in a sprig of rosemary from the garden.
Put the lid on the pan and cook on a medium heat for 30 minutes. Don’t let it burn.
If everything has slooped together and it tastes good, take out the rosemary stalk (if you put it in), add seasoning and reduce the sauce to the desired consistency.
You can throw in fresh basil at the end if you like. This is so simple and versatile and pretty quick. Enjoy!