What Sets You Free

The 2nd of May 2025. Yesterday, of course, was the 1st of May, the day when people celebrate the start of spring. Or at least they used to until most of them moved into town and cities and forget the countryside. In Oxford, of course, they do it in a particularly old-fashioned and bafflingly erudite way. They sing Latin hymns and dance fifteenth century dance numbers beneath Magdalen Tower, built in the year Henry VIII came to the throne. Although the king was to mature into the terrifying opposite of a spring chicken, the festival to celebrate this part of the calendar continued through all his troubled marriages, and the centuries of war, wealth, regret and change that were to follow. Yesterday was no different. Watched by hundreds of townsfolk, the festival was carried out, the tower bells rung and the students flung themselves drunkenly into the freezing river. Spring was welcomed in. Writing about this kind of May in June, Philip Larkin said: The trees are coming into leafLike something almost being said;The recent buds relax and spread,Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born againAnd we grow old? No, they die too,Their yearly trick of looking newIs written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles threshIn fullgrown thickness every May.Last year is dead, they seem to say,Begin afresh, afresh, afresh. But by the first of May of course, spring has long since sprung - and things are already afresh - so it really ought to be summer that is welcomed in. Maybe it's a hinge thing, a bit of both. But whatever it really it, it is a matter of great and monstrous marvel that a festival about growth, freedom and life should have been highjacked by the arms industry, generals, and war mongering political leaders as the best time to show off their arms – their tanks, rockets and other expensive military equipment. An optimist might say this is getting a bit better. In the old days, not so long since passed, the star of the international stage was the Kremlin. It was noted for its interminable drive-pasts of tanks and guns and fly-pasts of military jets. Most countries have a moment for similar shows of force – though none so cold blooded. Here in Sri Lanka Independence Day – the 4th of February – is the day designated for its show of force. Special wooden stalls are built facing the sea all down Galle Face Green with white clothed chairs set out for the dignitaries. And then under shade with the hot sun all around them, they all sit down, and watch Sri Lanka's military walk past. Flags are hosted - here and at Sri Lankan embassies abroad, priests of all sorts murmur their blessings, and the navy offer a 21-gun salute. They are part of a quite formidable military, over 150,000 personnel – half what it was the height of civil war and reducing still. And a third larger than the British Amry – or just 10% of the size of the Indian army. Not that Sri Lanka has any external enemies bent on invading its shores. It takes a while for politicians to learn how to wind down over extended armies, so they don't become the people in charge like they did in Turkey, or like they still are in Egypt. But compared to most of its near neighbours – in the Maldives, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the army here in Sri Lanka plays a remarkably back seat role in politics and has avoided making any significant direct interventions to influence or redirect elections. But nowadays May has to share its moment of symbolism with all sorts of other things. The month is much borrowed by counties and organisations to commemorate martyrs, medical cures, national heroes, flowers, truculent dictators, pizzas – even military spouses, smiles and the statehood of Minnesota. But really, and most of all though May is the moment to forsake madness and put aside its main promoter - the bleak winter, darkness, circumscribed dreams, cold and thick pyjamas. Nothing that was too hard, too impossible too ungraspable is any longer out of reach. With spring under your belt, you can go about your life with some degree of optimistic serenity, certain that for some months to come, the sun will shine, even if only metaphorically. And with that simple, critical readjustment, you feel free. Perhaps the most telling of all May day celebrations was that one back on 4th May 1961 when Bayard Rustin led the first freedom ride to challenge the racist segregation in practice on the buses of the American South. I hang on to this thought of freedom, even though such memories of winter austerity are rather wasted here in tropical Sri Lanka where the weather is either dry or wet, hot or warm. May on this island is traditionally wet, and on the cool side of warmer. Every tree and spice bush, rambling jungle creeper and fallen seed puts aside the dozy dry drought and gets growing again. You can smell it as much as see it. Having only just woken, I ...