Until I moved to England, I’d never seen a bumblebee. They’re brilliant: lumbering, fluffy, huge-bottomed, apparently convinced they should nest in my hair, and very cute. Usually I react to cute things by wanting to put them in my mouth, and bumblebees fly so slowly that you could eat them right out of the air; the only problem is that they aren’t delicious enough.
The idea that the world would be better if more things tasted nice is an old one. There are wedding dresses made of cream puffs and scale models of San Francisco made out of jelly; and there’s the mediaeval dream of Cockaigne, the country where the walls are pies and the flowers are buttered scones, and everything is the most delicious food you’ve ever tasted. The twelfth-century The Golden Dream tells the story:
There are rivers great and fine
Of oil, milk, honey and wine;
Water there serves no purpose
Except to be looked at and to wash with.
In Cockaigne, the animals want to be eaten. The pigs are fried and cheerful, walking around with knives in their backs, so that you can carve out a slice more easily. Nobody works, nobody is blind or ill, and you get paid to eat or drink. There are no laws (except against working), because everyone has everything they want. Owls lay fur coats, and horse defecate poached eggs.
The geese roasted on the spit
Fly to that abbey, God knows,
And cry out: “Geese, all hot, all hot!”
They bring along plenty of garlic.
Cockaigne is a world not just of greed but of sloth and lust and mischievous monks who fly away from the abbey when they’re supposed to be praying:
When the abbot sees for himself
That his monks fly away from him,
He takes a maiden of the company
And turns up her white behind
And beats the small drums with his hand
To make the monks alight on land.
When his monks see [him do] that,
They fly down to the maid
And go all around the wench
And pat all her white behind
And then, after their labor,
Go meekly home to drink.
No wonder that to get there, you have to wade chin-deep in pig dung for seven years. In the Netherlands, Cockaigne is Luileckerland, “lazy luscious land”, and can only be reached if you eat your way through a ten-thousand-foot-high rice pudding.
Come the 21st century, and remnants of Cockaigne hang about in Australian advertising campaigns:
Wouldn’t it be nice if the world was Cadbury?
Going to the pics would be so sweet!
There’d be no need for munchies:
Cad’bry Dairy Milk is the perfect treat.
If someone came and blocked your screen view,
Just take a bite and make a hole to see through.
Wouldn’t it be nice?
In other versions of the ad, viewers are urged to respond to ravenous sharks by saying “I’m chocolate — I invite you”. This is Cockaigne with the eater-eatee wall broken down, where it’s humans who wander the streets with benign smiles, relishing the opportunity to feed others.
Back in London, on this side of the ten-thousand-foot rice pudding hill, it’s cold and the bumblebees have gone into hiding. The best I can do is these honey-and-gingerbread bee biscuits (cookies if you’re American); inanimate, and too big to fly into your mouth in one go anyway, but crisp and chewy and not covered in hair. Just remember to pull out the eyes before you eat them.
