Yes yes yes - but can it hold a tune?

We're all familiar with the agony of choice when it comes to purchasing our latest trowel head. Who hasn't, doing their routine shop at the ironmonger, stood by the rack wondering which size, which material, which brand? Will the cheapy one do? But the ground's really hard right now, maybe I should go with the professional one at three times the money? I'm sure I don't need to go into detail - you're all trowel-head aficionados here. In Viana it's rather different. When buying a trowel head here, you have to think about Carnival first, and everything else a distant second.

I've mentioned Carnival in passing on here a few times already, and intend to use this year's to write a few entries to go into more detail. For an excellent, rather more articulate outsider's view on Carnival, I recommend Flour on the Skin, a documentary made by a friend of ours a few years back, featuring my missus in front of the camera. Well the Carnival atmosphere in the village is growing already, and the most obvious sign of this is the sound of the folion, the booming beats of the locals' drums and aixadas, rhythms which have become extremely familiar to me.

There are various folion groups, though essentially anybody can play with any group they hook up with. (It's not, of course, quite that cut and dried, and I've learned that something so important to locals is not without its own politics.) They all have two basic ingredients in common, though - large wooden drums, made by locals and both skinned and shoulder-strapped with local animal hides, and aixadas; trowel heads. If you don't fancy lugging a bloody great drum around all evening, or don't have the several hundred Euros each one costs, or simply prefer to play the trowel head, it's the aixada you'll take out with you.

Here's one of ours:

Essential folion kit for the drumless. Note the carry rope made of old
shopping bags - nothing wasted here - and the marks made by hitting
the aixada with the hammer.

As you can imagine, these make a hell of a noise, bringing me back to my original point. It seems that in Viana, if you're my missus at least, you buy your aixada as much for its sound as for any other quality. Exclusively for its sound, in fact, since we have no other use for this item. So it was that last week I found myself at the ironmongers, somewhat incredulously listening to various trowel heads being struck in an effort to determine which had the sweeter note. The ironmonger Jorge, an important figure for the Carnival locally, being heavily involved in organising many of the events associated with it, thought there was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about this.

I asked him only part-seriously if he sold more trowels for use as percussion than for use in the local farms, and he told me unhesitatingly that there was no doubt this was indeed the case.

I personally prefer to drum rather than go with the trowel. There's something truly visceral about your chest cavity vibrating to the beat of these things, and they can transport the drummers; many of the drum skins are mottled with the blood of the drummers' hands, so carried away do they get with beating them.  When hundreds turn up at once, as they do on the last night of Carnival, Mardi Gras, for the ceremonial burning of the Lardeiros (more on them in a later entry) it can feel like something out of a film. The combination of the huge drum beats, fire, fireworks exploding and flour drifting in the air at the same time is something that truly has to be experienced to be properly appreciated.

Friends who've come here for this, particularly from Britain, have described it in awed terms, leaving wide-eyed and exhausted at the end. Very few people here don't get absolutely animated and excited for it when it comes round. I'll try to give a small flavour of it over the next few entries.