“And after winter folweth grene May”
― Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde

“The month of May has come, when every lusty heart beginneth to blossom, and to bring forth fruit”
— Thomas Malory

“Forgive me if, in friendship’s way,
I offer thee a wreath of May…
Nourished by the dews of heaven…”
– John Clare

“As full of spirit as the month of May”
— William Shakespeare

“May is the month of expectation, the month of wishes, the month of hope”
— Emily Brontë

“Among the changing months, May stands confest the sweetest, and in fairest colours dressed”
— James Thomson

“I thought that spring must last forevermore; for I was young and loved, and it was May”
— Vera Brittain

“So closely, in their profusion, do they crowd together that lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour as to count the flowers in a meadow in May”
— Marcel Proust

“At last came the golden month of the wild folk — honey-sweet May, when the birds come back, and the flowers come out, and the air is full of the sunrise scents and songs of the dawning year”
— Samuel Scoville Jr

“May bursts, the rainbow of the months, sent as a sign — a promise of fruition”
– The National Magazine, May 1899

“But he calls down a blessing on the blossom of the may,
Because it comes in beauty, and in beauty blows away”
― WB Yeats

“Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!”
– Gerard Manley Hopkins

“Most people liked it best in the early spring, when the woods down to the river seemed to shift almost before one’s eyes from snowdrop white to daffodil yellow to the shimmer of bluebells … I shall always remember it with the profoundest gratitude, though, as it was that May, that last May, in the last of my old summers”
― Jan Morris, Conundrum

“And a bird overhead sang Follow,
And a bird to the right sang Here;
And the arch of the leaves was hollow,
And the meaning of May was clear”
― Algernon Charles Swinburne

A holiday friend is at your door

IN these days of (anti)social media, it is possible to “unfriend” someone who has committed some minor act of disparagement – but if you have issued a cocktail-fuelled “come and visit” invitation to friendly stranger you meet on holiday, it’s not so easy.

When Peter and Debbie meet the effervescent American Elsa on a cruise, they suggest that, if she comes to England, she must look them up. And she does. It’s not until she arrives that they fully understand that they don’t really know anything about this multi-widowed woman who is taking over their house. As the internet reveals reports of poisonings and police searches in Denver, their own house-bound anti-social teenage son becomes captivated and energised and his stroppy sister is equally taken by the Coloradan guest.

This is the outline of Stephen Moffat’s hilarious play The Unfriend, coming to the Swan Theatre in Yeovil from 18th to 23rd May, with Mark Payne and Sarah Nias as Peter and Debbie, Dudley King and Mabel Hodgson as their children, Robert Graydon as their obsessive neighbour and Liz Stallard as the Trump-loving transatlantic visitor.

If you are a Swan regular, you’ll know just how good the company is. If you have never visited Yeovil’s intimate theatre on Park Street, and you want to see a really funny play, now is the time.