Monday 8th October

What a wonderful word, Octoberon.  Oh, and in case you were wondering, I didn’t make it up.  It is actually the title of the eighth album (October being the eighth month in the Roman calendar) by Barclay James Harvest.   And again, in case you were wondering – this will not be a review of that admittedly beautiful album, which came out in October of 1976 by the way.

But whenever we slip into the month of October this lovely word comes into my head.  It is of course an almagam of October and Oberon, king of the faieries in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’  We only studied three Shakespeare plays in my Grammar school years, or the only three I can remember were this one, Macbeth and The Tempest, and I always liked this one the best.  Macbeth – I could never quite get the hang of who was slaughtering who and why, and the Tempest – I think by then I was past caring about Shakespeare or any other schoolwork either.  So that left ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and I don’t really know why I liked it so much, perhaps the language – it is almost entirely written in verse, but maybe because of the surreal nature of the thing and the very fact that it was all a dream making it possibly the first really modern piece of literature ever written.

So, Octoberon, a word that I have come to almost accept as real – the magical dreamlike month of October, full of woodland mists and faieries, and also a great album.