Had to spend a day in bed with a cold after Glastonbury and am still feeling groggy. Think it was brought on by a combination of things: being sneezed on in the crowd, changeable weather and a weaker immune system caused by exhaustion! Drove in each day and had to park about three miles from the centre of the site, which is itself enormous so reckon I tramped about ten miles daily: probably too much considering I wasn’t very fit. We’d just come back from a fortnight in the sun and eating and drinking excessively in North Portugal. Poor me. Am sure your heart bleeds.
Was the festival worth £155 plus £10 parking? Yes. I saw people I’d pay to see in concerts: Fun Loving Criminals; Joan Armatrading (fantastic set!); Buddy Guy (brilliant); Eddy Grant; Sinead O Connor (why is she still bald? Must find out); the Imagined Village; Neil Diamond (wouldn’t actually pay to see him); Leonard Cohen (yes!) and the Verve. And rent a car bulgaria as everyone will tell you, there’s much, much more at Glastonbury: trash city, outdoor circus acts, party atmosphere, fancy dress, people on stilts, people wearing horses’ heads and various really talented acts in smaller tents, cafés and lounges all over the site. I for one will try and find out more about Shambala (?) and Saraia (?) who were excellent, as were the Barnacles (?) on the bandstand.
Looking forward to reading The Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins which I have bought, with many others, at the Hay Festival bookshop. Our local town is becoming a transition town and I’m pleased that a group of younger people are organising the action for a change.
Am also looking forward to browsing through some of Hay’s 70 odd second hand bookshops this afternoon before going to hear Frieda Hughes and then, for some light relief, Toby Young.
It always rains at Hay Festival time. Can understand why people go to the Spanish Hay. We wore our walking boots to go and see Seckou Keita’s concert last night. Past caring! The band were excellent – Keita sunny and happy despite having run four workshops during the day. I thought he said they’d been to four wool shops and was bemused.
Fred Hageneder played his harp beautifully as we filed in to hear his lecture, in a tent at Hay on Wye. It is a simply-carved yew wood harp. He is very fond of the yew tree, which is why he has spent many years studying it, looking at its botanical values, and its cultural, spiritual and social significance. He is the first person to study this particular species of tree in such depth and from such a variety of angles.
Probably the most amazing thing about the yew is that after it has been alive for a couple of thousand years and is in the process of becoming hollow, it begins to grow a new trunk that moves down the inside of the hollow. Eventually, this takes over the functions of the old trunk and thus the tree is able to renew itself indefinitely – if left alone.
Britain is comparatively rich in yews, unlike many other European countries. Ironically, it was our country’s thirst for longbows in the past that led to the the depletion of yew woods elsewhere.
Fred has discovered all sorts of facts about the yew that aren’t generally known and I was so fascinated I bought the book, and another one by him called ‘The Spirit of Trees’. By the time John’s birthday came along, I’d acquired quite a collection of signed books, including Julian Barnes’s ‘Nothing to be Frightened of’. The author wrote: ‘To John, Happy Birthday, Julian Barnes’. Sweet! John also has a CD of Fred Hageneder’s harp music.
It has been fabulous sitting out in the garden these last few evenings. Last year we had a sunny April and that was it. We had no summer and I don’t remember sitting outside once. We didn’t have one barbecue. No wonder people were miserable.
This year we are going to have a hot summer, like that one in the seventies when we had sunshine every day from the start of May right until our wedding day mid October when it rained. All day. In those days I had an open top MG sports car and the hood never went down until the autumn.
I am so sure the weather is going to be good, I have bought a ticket for Glastonbury. John hasn’t because he thinks it’s too expensive and can’t believe it won’t rain. It’s £160 plus parking plus the cost of fuel each day. He thinks, ‘why pay all that to be cold and miserable in the mud surrounded by hoards of people?’
If you see just five acts then it’s OK because each concert you go to these days costs about £40 a ticket. I haven’t seen a programme yet but I’ll be seeing people like the Verve, Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez, Suzanne Vega, Elbow, Massive Attack and er Tony Benn, ….so I’ll get good value and have a great time.
I go there for the music and the madness. My youngest goes there for the scene or whatever you want to call it. But he, his friends and lots of people like him have deserted the festival in their droves. They are going somewhere warm and sunny abroad for less than the price of a Glastonbury ticket.
When it does rain at Glastonbury the ground turns very quickly to mud. And there is absolutely nowhere you can go to sit down. Walking about in the mud is really hard work and tiring. But it won’t be muddy.
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Pub owners become the victims of their success. They serve good food and drink, they work incredibly hard all the hours, and become worn out. It’s not the happy country life they expected. They are too knackered to enjoy themselves. New people come along and think they are purchasing a goldmine. If they are clueless, as they often are, long standing customers give them one chance only and then don’t return. Unless they are innocents hooked by ‘Egon Ronay recommended’ signs of five years before, no-one bothers to go in.
A pub near us suffered in this way. It used to be good and then became terrible. The ageing couple who bought it at the peak of its success didn’t know how to cook and they didn’t even know how to be sociable. Which is worse? When we heard it had been taken over by yet more people presumably in search of the good life, we assumed it would remain awful. But – hey – they do lovely food there now and a group of us had a wonderful meal there yesterday.
We did one of those walks which we find we’re doing more and more: meeting at the house of friends, walking to a pub and then walking back. They live three miles from the pub in question (as do we but in the other direction). We walked there along the Sowey, its brown water lined with all the usual nice stuff you find on the Somerset levels: rushes, wild flowers, but not flag irises yet, willows, hawthorn bushes just about still in blossom and as they say, much, much more. The same goes for all the rhines that border the fields instead of hedges. The fields were green, yellow and white (grass, dandelion flowers, buttercups, dandelion clocks, daisies, ladysmock); chestnut and white cows and their calves grazed; someone saw a hare.
We were early so we stopped at the village church: pretty ancient – one of the Viking leaders, Guthrun, was converted to Christianity and baptised there. Stained glass is not everyone’s cup of tea but it has some glorious glowing windows, including one of Alfred the Great who camped at nearby Athelney, then a lump of raised ground above wetlands that were much soggier than they are today.
Carla’s Song is a powerful film starting off on a Glasgow bus and finishing in the hell hole that was Nicaragua during the days of the Contra repressions. Loach makes it clear that manipulation, and more, from the Americans resulted in the deaths of thousands of ordinary people who only wanted a better standard of living. It’s also the story of the love the driver of the bus has for Carla, the Nicaraguan singer whom he rescues from uniformed pettiness and a life of degradation and poverty in Glasgow. He takes her back to Nicaragua and together they track down the lover, Antonio, she had before a truck they were travelling on was blown up (by Americans/Contras). Antonio was horrifically tortured. His tongue was ripped out, his back smashed and his eyes blinded by acid. Despite how he is now, she stays with him and the bus driver goes back to life in Glasgow. A good film but I think Robert Carlyle, though a good actor, wasn’t the right guy for the bus driver role. A bit puny. Hard to believe she’d get involved with him. We needed to see Colin Firth there I think.
Ladysmock and dandelions down on the Levels; bluebells, cowslips and primroses in Maggoty Paggoty woods where we walked today with Charlie and Remy the dogs. Looks like a good year for wild flowers.
When we moved to Somerset in the early 80s the Levels were in danger of being turned into yet more boring farmland, pesticided to high heaven and sod the consequences. Farmers near here even burned effigies of the head of the local wildlife trust because the organisation wanted to protect the wetlands - rare and wildlife-rich stretches of land which are all around the place I live in. The media called it the ’second battle of Sedgmoor’ as west Segdmoor was the piece of moorland most threatened by agri-business. There was a farm not far from here that displayed huge signs saying ’spray and be proud’ or something like that.
How times have changed! Now there’s money in nature conservation. That very same farm has trees growing in the once bright greenly-fertilised field that edges the road. Back in the 80s, the local council still sprayed the verges with weedkiller. Can you believe it? Why? Best not to ask but probably to do with the persuasiveness of the manufacturers of the stuff. Good old days my foot. So things are sort of better but the land is now threatened by pressure from property developers, who can also be very persuasive.
By the way, I am abandoning my BT email address because someone pretending to be me is peddling ‘Viagra’ and other ‘pills’. I went to the web address linked cited in the emails to find the ‘business’ is operated by a so called Canadian pharmaceutical company. Any poor so and so sending money to that outfit may as well send it to A.Crook and co. My brother Bob is changing his email address because ‘he’ has, unbeknownst to him, been offering to procure Russian girls for all and sundry!
Swallows
Saw my first swallow of the year on Monday and another today. They’re not particularly early. They’ve arrived in March some years. We have a bluetits’ nest outside the bedroom window, in the gutter, and blackbirds are nesting in the honeysuckle covering the defunct satellite dish below the window: this is the reason we keep the dish as they nest there every year.
The garden is full of blossom: plum, damson, bird cherry and hawthorn and the apple blossom is in bud. We have onions, broad beans, kale, red cabbage, carrots and parsnips growing and I will put herb seeds into pots tomorrow. There are tadpoles in the pond. It’s really a wonderful garden at this time of year and, being a wildlife garden it’s low maintenance.
Depressing news to the south of where we are staying in Spain of corrupt politicians giving the nod to dodgy development projects. They include huge housing estates largely for second home owners and expats, massive out of town shopping malls which will put local shops out of business, and the creation of sandy beaches on ecologically rich rocky shorelines.
Does the Costa Blanca need yet more sandy beaches?Ecologistas en Accion say the plan would destroy fish breeding grounds in an area of small coves and cliffs and kill offshore sea grass prairies. Further south still, the last virgin piece of coastline at Cala de la Mosca near Orihuela is being lost to development.
The local English language newspaper is quite blatant about the ‘cosy relationship’ between town halls and developers. In the issue I have just read, there’s a story about one mayor who was shot dead; another who’s been arrested in a corruption inquiry and yet another story about the ruination of a mountain after a now ‘disgraced’ mayor gave the go ahead for a massive housing development. A sprawl of 1500 houses is going up on Penya Royal, ‘an emblematic mountain peak.’
What is ridiculous is that the country is supposed to be protecting its coastlines now. Owners, often expats, of small houses built right by the sea are being ordered to knock them down to ‘restore the coastline’ while further along, massive development companies are bribing councillors to let them concrete over every last patch of coastal woodland.
The drive south to Alicante arport used to be scenic, apart from when you passed Benidorm. Now, roads are being carved into what were once stunning, wildlife rich pine-covered headlands. I’m sure many Spanish people don’t want pine woods to be turned into concrete jungles but I’ve noticed they often have a shoulder-shrugging ‘We can’t do anything about it’ attitude. And maybe the majority of them don’t care a fig about nature conservation. Villas and houses, at least, have gardens to provide wildlife corridors but what’s going up are huge slabs of town houses with very little green relief. Great pity they don’t have a National Trust.
On a lighter note, well, sort of, there’s a story in the paper about two men fishing on a rock near Altea being shot at by a man on a jet ski. Absurd! Perhaps he was an Ecologist in Action who thought they were devising a housing development there.
Well, it was either going to be about cleaning, or Polish people. ‘The Polish Play’, performed by the four actor Farnham Maltings company, touring village halls in Somerset and Dorset, including one near here, was rather peculiar, though I did write ‘heartwarming’ in the comments book. It was basically the story of the lead actress, a Polish girl, though we weren’t told it was her true story until the end. She left her village, where everyone knew everyone, and where most people worked on the land and were self sufficient, for a big adventure. But the job she’d been promised in England vapourised. Her father, who’d travelled with her, to her embarrassment, tried to persuade her to go back to the people she knew and loved, but she stayed, without money or prospects. She ended up as an actress for this tiny travelling theatre company. Quite sweet but it really did need more dramatic momentum. And it ended so abruptly you thought ‘Is that it?’
The protagonist did have more of an adventure than I did, leaving my country village near the the Staffordshire Shropshire border, for the big city. She travelled across the sea; I went to Bristol. But when she said she liked being able to buy shiny pink chicken in a plastic tray rather than having one killed and plucked, a childhood memory came to me. My mother sent me to Mr Holford’s farm to buy a chicken for our Sunday lunch, quite a treat. Mrs Holford chose a chicken for me and wrung its neck while I waited, (at eight I was obviously deemed grown up enough to witness this). I watched, horrified, gripping the shopping bag my mother had given me, tightly. Getting the dead creature keypress motorola ringtones,free keypress motorola ringtones v60i,motorola keypress ringtonesdownload nextel ringtones softwarepolyphonic ringtones t720free ringtones for verizon prepaid phone,free ringtones for verizon phonecelcom malaysia caller ringtonesdownload hindi ringtones1600 nokia ringtones100 free mobile ringtones virginfree cingular music ringtoneslow cost payday loanhour loan one payday,faxless hour loan one payday,hour in loan one paydayinstant approval payday loan,approval instant loan paydayfree payday loanpayday cash loan500 faxing loan no payday quick,payday loan no faxing cheap,faxing loan no paydayfast cash advance payday loanca in loan payday software,loan payday softwareadvance cash loan payday software1000 cash loan payday advance,cash loan payday,check to cash payday loanameriloan payday loan1000 loan no payday telecheck,1000 advance payday loan,1000 loan paydayno faxing instant payday loanadvance cash loan payday wiredpayday loan paycheck advancecheck loan no payday teletrack,loan no payday telecheck teletrack,no teletrack payday loanfax guaranteed loan no paydaypayday loan 10001000 fax loan no payday,fax loan payday,cash fax loan loan no paydayloan payday sonic,sonic payday loanno fax payday cash advanceapplication loan payday,payday loan applicationbad credit instant loan payday,bad credit loan payday,bad credit loan loan not paydayloan online payday quickcash advance payday loanpayday cash advance,advance cash payday ringtone,payday cash advance texasguaranteed faxless payday loan,faxless advance payday loan,faxless loan paydaycanada loan online payday,canada faxless in loan payday,payday loan in canadasavings account payday loancash advance payday loan softwareadvance? cash loan online payday ?instant payday loan30 day payday loan1 hour loan payday,1 hour payday loan,payday loan in 1 hourpayday advance loan,personal loan payday advance bad credit,bad credit payday advance loandefault loan paydayno faxing payday loan2 loan online paydaydefault on payday loanadvance cash loan payday quickhour loan online payday back home was nerve-wracking and the stuff of nightmares. A dead, headless, deceased, ex-chicken it may have been but that didn’t stop it jerking and lurching about inside the bag as I walked. It is what dead chickens do. I was glad to get home so that I could hand the cargo to my mother.