It’s the Unawatuna Festival this week. How do I know this? Well, I can hear the monks chanting from wherever I am in the house. How does it impact on mum? From 8.30 in the morning to late in the evening, the monks at the temple on the beach chant. This is transmitted via loud-speakers from the far end of the beach, it reverberates in the hollow that is the beach and reaches us at the top of the hill quite distinctly. “Those men are at it again,” mum comments. And indeed they are. The festival lasts a week so I have another two days to go. For some reason it always sneaks up on me. Although I know it happens once a year in August and starts on the same day every year, it always surprises me. It started last Wednesday 2^nd August on Nikini Poya (full moon day) and marks the start of “Vas”, the Buddhist monks rainy retreats. It’s made me ponder festivals.

If asked, I would have replied that as a family we never really did festivals.  However like a lot of things, on reflection, life paints a different story.  I was born on Lanimer Day in Lanark and nearly got called Brenda as a result because she was the Lanimer Queen that year and visited me in the hospital. Or to be more precise she came to visit the William Smellie Memorial Hospital in Lanark, which was where my mum gave birth.   Lanimer Day, held on the Thursday between the 6th and 12 June, (in my case the 12^th) is a big local festival. The Lanimer Procession is made up of schoolchildren and others parading through the town in costume accompanying decorated floats and marching brass and pipe bands.  The roots of Lanimer Day lie (I recently discovered in Wikipedia) in the checking of the March stones which were the boundaries of the Royal Burgh. Beginning in 1140, it started as a day’s celebration but by the late 19^th early 20^th century the events had extended into a week.  So I was born into a week-long festival.

Halloween also holds a lot of memories. Getting dressed up as all sorts of things with the help of mother. My mum was a primary teacher and therefore was quite handy at making bizarre things like dalek outfits from cardboard boxes and bat capes from parachute satin (my dad was a navigator in the RAF during the war). One year I was the joker with a bright green jumper which I completely destroyed by drawing large question marks on it with black felt pen. Looked great though! It must have been a safer time then as I don’t remember any parents accompanying us on our tour of the houses for ‘trick or treat’.

Being Scottish we also went in for New Year in a big way. Pre-18 the three kids were all given avocat as a special treat at the bells. We would watch the Reverend I M Jolly on tv. One of my brother’s friends who had dark hair had to be sent out the back door and in the front door to be the lucky first footer of the New Year – Scottish New Year protocol dictated the first person in your house at the start of the New Year had to be dark haired to be lucky. He would carry coal or more likely shortbread out the backdoor and in the front door. Protocol also demanded the first footer to carry something as a present. As the three of us kids got older and moved away from home we were always back at New Year. I have no idea how mum put up with it but Xmas holidays saw our house full of people every night. There was a steady supply of sausage rolls and roasted cheese and branston pickle on toast for whoever was invited down after the pub shut. Looking back it must have cost her a small fortune because I don’t remember us as students ever contributing.

But back to today and the Unawatuna festival.  The village traces its roots to the great epic Ramayana. In the mythological epic so the story goes, Jambavan sent Hanuman, the monkey-warrior to India to bring back four medicinal herbs from the Himalayas to heal Lakshman who had been wounded trying to save Princess Sita from the demon king Ravana. Unable to identify the herbs, he picked the whole mountain up and took it to the battlefield in an attempt to save Lakshman. On route however, a bit of it fell down in present day Unawatuna; "Una-watuna" means "fell down". It changes from a fairly sleepy village in July into a hive of activity in August for that one week of the festival. The festival is usually preceded by a power cut which means they have overloaded the circuit testing the lights which stretch along the road and up the hill to the temple – reminiscent of Blackpool.  My brother, his wife and kids all accompanied Chaminda in the tuk tuk to see the local perehera last Friday. My brother went into knots as he misheard ‘perehera’ (procession) and thought I had said ‘pair of hairies’ (Glaswegian slang for 2 youths with a lot of hair). What was in the procession? Two elephants decked out in their finery, stilt walkers, whip crackers, Kandyan dancers, all sorts of kids doing traditional dances in brightly coloured costumes, all winding their way to the temple at the far end of the beach. The family had a great time.

Bit different from the Lanimer Day Procession; but both trace their roots to stones.