ix: Foraging through Folklore
In praise of lazy Ella Leith
This is a sleepy time of year for me. In Malta, in the tiny city where I live, the 10th August marks the celebration of the local patron saint, St. Lawrence. The ten weeks preceding the festa are filled with preparations and precelebrations. Trucks, cherry-pickers and bands of festa committee members trundle the narrow streets, carrying flagpoles, festoons, and richly embroidered pavaljuni with which to decorate the town. From first light, the city is filled with the sound of revving engines, beeping horns, busy hammers, and bellowing voices. As the festa falls on a Wednesday this year, the eves and mornings of the Ten Wednesdays of St. Lawrence can be particularly raucous, with the clamour of church bells, brass and pipe bands, fireworks, confetti canons, and shouts of "Viva, San Lawrenz!" I don't expect to get much sleep between 24th May and 11th August this year. For the festa proper, the pjazza will host a vast and chaotic street party from dawn 'til midnight, and a huge statue of the saint will be carried shoulder high from the parish church and through the town. The statue depicts St. Lawrence standing with the symbol of his martyrdom— a huge gridiron, upon which it is claimed he was burnt alive in 261
CE. "This half of my body is already roasted," Lawrence is reputed to have called out to his executioner, the Emperor Valerian (no relation to this issue's Herb of the Month). "Order them to turn me over, and you will be able to eat!" (Bennett, 2002:101). In a darkly humorous (or perhaps just tasteless) twist, St. Lawrence is now the patron saint of barbeques (thecatholiccommentator.org)— and also of comedians (Kosloski, 2019). I read his last words as a moment of defiant mockery of his executioners; for churchmen, it is evidence of a religious fervour for sanctification through extended suffering (Bennett, 2002). In the folk tradition, however, it has been attributed to the saint's lethargy— 'evidence of his being too lazy to turn himself' (Smith, 1996:102). It seems harsh to accuse someone of sloth while they're being tortured to death. However, the name Lawrence has been associated with laziness in several folk traditions. Variations of the phrase 'as lazy as Lawrence' appear across England, including 'to have Lawrence on one's back', 'to be plagued with Lawrence', and 'to have a fit of Lawrence' (Smith, 1996:102). In the late nineteenth century, an Oxfordshire man 35
