An Encounter in Neep Space
by - 22:56 on 28 October 2008
All right, I know it’s obscure. I also considered ‘Truly, madly, neeply’. Anyway, I feel it’s worth recording that neep growers everywhere will be entirely unsympathetic to the recent news that the English pumpkin crop has either failed or produced a low yield. For some years now, this bloated New World usurper has diminished the role of our own home grown vegetable at Halloween.You don’t know what a neep is? You’re not from around these parts then? It’s a, well, uhmm, globe-shaped root vegetable of a purple hue. About the size of a skull. You think I mean a swede? Or a turnip? I don’t know. My dad called the large purple kind ‘neeps’ and the small white ones ‘swedes’ – but I know other folk label them the other way round. Anyway, a wee white one would be no use at Halloween because neeps were hollowed out to make that de rigeur lantern-thingie – a role now taken on by pumpkins.
There were lots of traditions associated with this time of year in Scotland. Most of them have disappeared but you can find references to them in the poem Halloween by Robert Burns. These involved, for example, peeling apples, pulling the stalks of kail, burning nuts, and various other rituals for the purposes of divination. It’s all a very long way to supermarket shelves groaning with ghoulish paraphernalia, long before the pumpkin became a symbol of Halloween globalisation.
There was one other ritual, which probably still goes on in rural Scotland. I’ve seen it myself when I lived next to a farm. It had nothing to do with Halloween, to be honest. All it required was a great heap of neeps piled in the farmyard. From despised root vegetables, they were suddenly transformed into objects of desire. I’ve seen respectable folk stop their cars – though leaving the engine running – and help themselves. I suspect this was more to do with soup-making rather than anything more sinister. You could call it kidneepping.
Here are some neep-spotting field notes, should you find yourself travelling around Scotland with nothing much else to look at in the countryside. (This means you’re probably near Strichen.) First of all, while neeps are usually silent, they can sometimes make a rhythmic sound –a bit like ‘thunk-thunk-thunk’. This is when they are harvested on a large scale by some kind of tractor-drawn devilish device, which projects them into a metal cart drawn in parallel to the first tractor. It’s hypnotic, trust me. Secondly – and not many people know this – you can tell if a field has neeps in it immediately after sowing because the upturned earth, in profile like an inverted ‘V’, has an indentation on the peak. Without the indent, you’re possibly looking at carrots, or more likely, tatties. I can’t remember. In fact I dozed off myself for a minute there.
Anyway, Halloween is an unappealing grisly kind of celebration at the beginning of winter, hijacked by commercial tat. And you don’t even get a drink. But Burns Suppers are something else. Fellow Scots – stand by your neeps!
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