The road to Clun, the back road, weaves to and fro across the border, so that you soon stop noticing the signs welcoming you to Herefordshire or Powys or Shropshire, and it is bounded by hills and forests on either side that seem little altered over centuries. It passes tiny, slumbering market towns and hamlets with names like New Invention. Towering pine forests cede to sunlit parkland, and back again.
We passed a black-and-white pub with a vine-draped garden and a railway siding that had slept for a hundred years. I think these things were in Knighton; the winding lanes were hypnotic, like watching a silent trailer for a fairy tale, and they washed over me without ever being properly mapped. The organisers of Clun Green Man festival were clear that festival-goers should, if at all possible, go to Clun via Knighton rather than via the real roads, the inhabited roads, the roads that go through towns with people in them. My father and children and I were early, too early, expecting traffic jams and diversions, and found instead a church with the Green Man adorning its porch in a large, child-made banner, and beside it some people in hi-vis jackets.
If there is a consistent signifier of the contemporary English festival, it is the fluorescent yellow tabard. The branding and signage and AA route signs are all interchangeable, and the weekends from May to September thick with cars pursuing them in all directions; it is only when you find the hi-vis people that you know you are near.
When the British enthusiasm for festivals first exploded ten years or so ago, when events popped up as thick and fast as roadside wildflowers in midsummer, you would have expected the hi-vis tabard to exist in counterpoint to a suntan and dreadlocks born of time in fields. Festival crew were festival folk, and were identifiable as such, and the tabard was merely a nod to the more bourgeois sensibilities of the police and licensing authorities, for its wearer was far more likely to be in possession of an eighth of weed than directions or knowledge of the onsite health and safety policy.
The hi-vis people I encountered were neither stoned nor pierced, and had the air of the WI about them. The car park was in the field to the left of the bridge; the town, which has 642 inhabitants, stopped there too. Clustered between the bridge and a high mound at the edge of the town were the coloured tops of tents and stalls, edged around the castle perimeter in a way that, if you peered over the top of the hedge to excise the cars from view, seemed convincingly timeless. A man, wild-bearded, drove his grandchildren past in an ancient Rover. My father, whose beard was neat and suburban and whose Skoda was new and clean, pretended not to notice, although I was sure that he was envious.
We walked into town, past the beginnings of an event: clipboards, portaloos, people drinking coffee by a soundsystem installed tentatively outside a cafe by the bridge where the action would happen, hoping that it would not rain. We looked for a cash machine. Wandering the streets, or street, since there was only one with things on it, we were indistinguishable from the other people who were too early: a Middle England family of three generations doing cultural tourism on a Bank Holiday. And yet there was something odd about this bit of Middle England. It, or some of it, was wearing garlands of artificial flowers in its hair. Its skirts were longer and more embroidered, and its beer guts projected screen-printed forest-gods into view. We walked past the Sun Inn, bathed in yellow render and with a handpainted sign depicting the sun.
There are ways of depicting natural phenomena that are respectable, a Reader’s Digest model of the world around us in which birds and bees and sunshine are represented in accurate little sketches and etchings, like the inside of a new British passport with its swallows and swifts and meadows. There are childish ways of doing so, too, oversimplifying things into unthreatening jollity, a nature as seen in In the Night Garden. Then there is another way, a way that imbues it with a face or character but in a way that is not the childish way, and that has the quality of an animist god.
This image of the sun was like that of a sunflower, dominated by a round face and surrounded by rays like golden petals on a background like a dark blue summer sky. I suppose this was because it was an image of the sun elided with an image of nature and an image of a season: it was a sun that was alive. Across the road, schoolchildren had made a Green Man collage that sat in the ironmonger’s window. The ordinariness of seeing these images in small-town England had an eerie quality: it was a world as we know it, but underpinned by a set of principles so radically different from our own that it felt as though we didn’t know it as much as we thought we did.
We wandered back down to the bridge. A man in a bright hat and waistcoat, simultaneously medieval jester and Goa casualty, danced to his own internal beat, eyes lowered ecstatically. I thought I overhead someone nearby refer to him as the Creative Director, but there was a crowd forming, and it might have been an error. In the queue for the loos, the woman behind me summoned her partner to carry her cloak. My three-year-old daughter got restless, climbed the railings and started rapping about the fight between the Green Man and Jack Frost. The queue looked on approvingly, despite the inaccurate substitution of Jack Frost for the Frost Queen, which was my mistake, passed on in the car.
The Clun Green Man festival is England’s last surviving example of what Laurence Whistler calls ‘Perhaps the best pageant … a very ancient one: The Battle of Winter and Summer.’ At Clun, summer is embodied as the Green Man, and winter as the Frost Queen, but the pageant is otherwise identical in its conception to Whistler’s description of it, with a procession of the wintry entourage banging drums and playing ‘rough music’ intercepted by the summer crew, who are then roused by the audience to win the ensuing mock battle. The set-up is that Team Summer always wins, but it is not supposed to be a shoo-in: the winter folk are numerous and put up a good fight, and the audience needs to do some work to ensure the summer’s safety.
Summer felt a way off. As the crowd coalesced along the banks of the river Clun, forming a neat two-pronged amphitheatre with the bridge as its stage and the pebble island between as a sort of Arcadian moshpit, we settled at the base of a young chestnut tree whose branches framed the top of our field of vision.
The air hung damp around us. It was too early in May to be warm, and people were dressed for rain. They had mostly done this in the usual Marches manner of sensible rainwear, but a distinct minority took a more medieval line, in green velvet cloaks and layers of heavy knitwear, and they wore their garlands defiantly, heads unhooded, as though provoking the rain to come on the day their man was there to defend them. They may not have been pagans. They may have been enthusiastic medievalists. It wasn’t easy to tell at first glance. It was the men, with their Green Man T-shirts, who were the giveaway. If your thing with cloaks is primarily about dressing up fourteenth-century style, you’d make your husband wear breeches; if they were happily anachronistic priestess robes, he’d be fine in a T-shirt with a man-god on it.
I counted heads on the opposite bank in an attempt to determine a pagan:cagoule ratio, which I estimated as about 1:8. The people who had dressed up had done so in clusters, tribelets of fairy-women and boys with ivy crowns. They were the elite in this audience, the cool ones. They let their children slip down the grassy banks and across the water to the island, so that their feet got wet. The best ones went with them.
The people in cagoules did not approve of this. Their children, who were wearing wellies, begged to go to the island too, for there was still time before the pageant began. There was a moment that looked as though it might become an anarchic tipping-point, when there were enough children on the island for the ones in rainwear to sense a weakening in parental control, and they were about to exploit it, and then a man on stilts with a tree-embroidered cloak and a branch in his hand turned on a microphone.
The cagoule-people listened attentively. On the island, a woman danced with her child. She was wearing a silver brocade dress with a pattern of the sun on it and a green velvet jacket. She danced as unselfconsciously as the children. She was pretty, raver-slim and long-haired, barefoot and unmade-up, and the semi-ceremonial dress nominated her as May Queen, but nobody seemed to notice this.
Some drums started up and a woman in a swirly red cloak began to dance on the bridge. Everyone sat and watched attentively. A boy swirled some fire poi. The Creative Director swayed and rocked, as if invoking something. The drums rolled, and a silvery procession appeared from the town. The Frost Queen arrived with a gang of fierce little girls and chanted some threats about everlasting winter. The crowd photographed this on its phones and booed tentatively, so as not to disrupt the performance. The stilt-man asked the crowd how it felt at the prospect of eternal winter, and announced the Green Man. The crowd, understanding this to be a cue to cheer, cheered. The Green Man arrived, hulk-like, horned, bearing a club. They faced off.
The Creative Director reached a point of mystic ecstasy. Beneath him, on the island, the May Queen and the children danced and jumped and cheered. The cloaked people cheered from their bank, and the cagoule-people observed the scene on the bridge, regarding the revelries beneath it as an irritation, a distraction from the main event. You could correlate the degree of joining-in-ness to tribal membership, and the way this membership was indicated by dress. You could construct a huge Venn diagram with intersecting sets of ravers and pagans and folklorists and hippies and the cagoule-people. It was not clear at this point which group dominated, but on grounds of authenticity of experience, the May Queen, the kids and the Creative Director were winning.
There were people who were being celebrants, or performing being celebrants: the dancers and the drummers and the fire poi. There were other people, the cloaked people and the garlanded people, who were wearing clothes that alluded to ritual and were at least engaged and cheering and being present, but they remained resolutely seated next to the cagoule-people. There was not much joining in here from the grown-ups.
Whistler lamented the lost art of joining in back in 1947, saying of the May celebrations that ‘only the children are unselfconscious enough to dance in public’. Watching the scene on the river, I thought about this some more. Whistler mentions King James’s Book of Sports, a document sent out to every parish in the land detailing which folk activities, as, for example, the maypole, were to be permitted, apparently in order to prevent the Church’s more puritanical impulses from banning fun entirely. The Book of Sports also offers an interesting snapshot of the rise of organised team sports supplanting private enjoyment of free time in an ever more socialised world. Fun became leisure, serried in its own way, and the ability to do joy, or be joy, was something that got legislated away into sets of rules for proper behaviour.
And that was when Britain remained a largely agrarian culture. Even if you were a tenant-farmer, you still decided what to do with your time. You might have been dirt-poor, but you had a degree of autonomy. And even if you worked domestically for someone higher up the feudal ladder, you were instructed by one or two people, whose concern would be that things got done, not that a single task took place in a precise mode and at a precise time.
Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, America’s notorious home-grown terrorist of the 1990s, gave up his academic career teaching mathematics at Berkeley in favour of living in the woods in Montana. He bombed airlines and universities in protest at the encroachment of technology upon individual liberty, and the ever-greater organisational structures that enabled it; he wanted people to read his manifesto on Industrial Society and Its Future, even if there had to be collateral damage along the way.
Kaczynski is particularly astute on the impact of industrial society on the individual capacity for autonomous action, and on the dangers of over-socialisation, seeing the individual human spirit being subjugated into the ever-increasing repression of institutional activity. His manifesto, though extreme, is not very crazy.
As industrial society sucks human existence into an evermore organised, restricted and comfortable existence, in which the individual will-to-power has no meaningful outlet, Kaczynski designates sports and art and most forms of non-urgent work as surrogate activities which create an illusion of purpose and autonomy for those engaging in them. We are all like the emperor Hirohito, immersed in marine biology lest the ennui of existence drive us mad. We exercise pretended freedoms in our art, no longer knowing what freedom really is. We are post-instinctive and inert.
You could describe anarchic, wood-dwelling Kaczynski as taking an extreme Green Man position, one that places the individual freedom of all forms of life above all else, and that seeks to dismantle all impositions on this freedom from authority at all costs. It is a call to primitivism of necessity rather than romance. The key cost is the loss of technology, for any technology that requires large and complicated institutions to make it entails a degree of institutional repression.
Here, in our post-industrial world, we behave according to unspoken sets of institutional rules and expectations, and take our cues from what is expected of us rather than what we feel like doing. Watching the scene at Clun, which had slowly altered from being a mass participatory ritual to a small performed spectacle, I thought about the neat rows of audience, for that was what we were, sitting and observing and occasionally taking photographs. We formed ourselves naturally into orderly positions, so as best to share the space, and understood the scenario as one in which we were there to observe a performance.
Being and performance are entirely different things. Being is all about intention, engaging with whatever spirit it is that you are inhabiting and living, and taking it into your body and mind, suspending your self in the process. Performing is all about presenting a story to your audience, and without an audience there can be no performance. It requires only a superficial adoption of the story. It is semiotic rather than mindful in character. When the audience is not in the same space as you, when the audience is sitting on its arse elsewhere, your relationship is one where you provide it with the commodity of entertainment. It’s hard to see how that can be a truly ritual act, one imbued with intention. It is an act being given to other humans for consumption, rather than to the gods.
The event at Clun was organised with the desire for joining-in in mind. The master of ceremonies, in his long robes, did all he could to raise cheers, and in doing so raise his audience from its slumber, to get it to become something instead. The audience sat on the riverbank, imprisoned by the assumption of performance, watching.
When the pageant finished, the gates to the castle ground opened, and an orderly queue formed to enter. The sun came out. The cagoule-people shed their outer layers like snakes emerging from dead skins. We climbed the castle mound and watched lines of people move from tent to tent, buying trinkets and ice-creams, at their ease now. The Green Man was available for photo opportunities. You could buy jute bags and garden ornaments with his face on. It was time to go home.
A few days later I called a contact, Z, hoping to negotiate a solstice tour of Avebury, where she had grown up. She was somewhere noisy, and escaped to somewhere less noisy, and I still couldn’t make out much of what she was saying, except that it contained the words ‘mayhem’ and ‘dancing’ and sounded fun. She called back later, saying that she’d been in Helston, as though that were an explanation, and I looked it up and realised that I’d missed something.
The Helston Furry Dance was a whole-town affair, where the dances began first thing, and varied from orderly lines of paired-off lords and ladies in their Sunday best to wilder, more riotous affairs of people decked out in garlands of foliage, like gangs of Green Men and Women, some beneath a Green Man banner, taking to the streets. There was a programme of different dances through the day, for schoolchildren and adults of diverging degrees of respectability. It didn’t sound like an audience-oriented activity.
It also didn’t call itself a festival, a word that was sounding a bit sedate these days, something you could televise and market. As soon as you have to call something a festival, you admit defeat so far as spontaneous revelry is concerned. All the words we use to describe the coming together of people, in its various structures and forms, have their own shifting colour. A festival was once a coming together of people with feasting and revelry, but now we feast daily and the feast has lost its meaning, and we no longer know how to do revelry in public. We need it brought to us instead, at a safe distance denoted by a stage, and a barrier beyond it.
A festival is now, instead, an entertainment comprised of a plurality of entertainments – one performance is a gig, three a show, ten a festival. A carnival is still able to party, even if we have to import the term from sunnier places, having lost sight of our own native word. Import the term ‘parade’ into the carnival, and it loses its carnivalesque quality – we’re back into the safe sphere of performance again.
The Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin describes the carnival as place of sacrilege, in which normal mores are temporarily upturned. It is a coming together of people on equal and anarchic terms, and an exercise in being. The carnival also provides a political outlet, an overthrowing, for a moment of time, of the established order of things, in the way that the Roman Saturnalia inverted the roles of masters and slaves, and in the way that our own festivals were once overseen by ephemeral Lords of Misrule. Without misrule, there is no carnival, or festival in its original sense. It is simply an entertainment, a transaction.
Perhaps I’d over-romanticised an event in a county I had never been to, and that I might well never get round to actually seeing, but I felt slightly mournful at having missed it. Z said Cornwall had stayed wild in way that other places hadn’t. Maybe it was just too far from everywhere else. Z was starting to think that she wanted to be there for the solstice – she’d just got back from Africa and wanted to settle for a bit – and I said I’d be at Avebury, but would come down later in the summer.
When the time came, going to Avebury seemed like it had been divinely ordained. The sky was high and cloudless all the way, down the steep mountain pass where it was bounded by hard reddish hillsides, reflected in the Usk and the golden-green leaves along it, above the vastness of the Severn crossing, making the sea blue. It was perfect solstice weather: the forecast on the radio said so, and in The Archers they were planning bonfires and getting laid at a festival, which seemed authentic.
I had agreed to meet my friend M by the M4. The Swindon business park where we slept a few hours displayed signs of magical activity. There were the people at the drive-through Subway in striped breeches and crimson robes. There was the hare the size of a dog standing in an empty car park as though he owned it. Across the dual carriageway, and sliced up by it and the Holiday Inn Express and the Volkswagen dealership and the sweeping overhead power lines was an enchanting forest of oaks, lit pinkly all the way to the back as the sun fell. The brambles were in full blossom.
On BBC Points West, in between pieces on local sporting teenagers and traffic updates, they did a special solstice weather forecast from Glastonbury Tor, with the sunrise time and the actual solstice, which is the point at which the sun passes closest by. This information was provided without advice on reaching Stonehenge, or scare pieces about marauding New Age travellers; it was for its local demographic. Everyone was a pagan now.
We tried to sleep, in that self-defeating mode where the act of pursuit undermines the thing pursued, and watched more TV in an attempt to get bored enough to have another try at it. There was some kind of cookery show on, in which three contestants who were, theoretically, celebrities had to make dinner for a triumvirate of marginally more celebrated judges. Three chefs weighed in with a culinary meta-analysis.
If you held a spiritual-but-not-religious yen for the sacred number three, here it was in threes. The show was edited so that every action was ritualised, with the same shot used to show each of the three contestants’ preparation of each of the three courses, and with each contestant flopping, exhausted-but-relieved, onto one of three sofas at the end. The judgements were presented with a snippet of dramatic music, the three candidates in their sacrificial whites and glowing teeth standing nervous, waiting to be dispatched into the blackness of un-fame.
Even the people who weren’t going to stay up all night or get up at stupid times to stand in fields needed public ritual, ritual that needed to be ostentatiously structured in order to make its ritual quality apparent. If ritual is, as Ronald Hutton would have it, action with intent, the reality TV genre made a living from the appearance of it, if not the thing itself. We tired of it and slept.
A few hours later, in the sodium-lit car park, the sky was black and the air was becoming damp with morning. The moon was veiled in a haze, encouragingly mystic, probably just a visual disturbance of the sleep-deprived. I didn’t feel sleep-deprived enough, in a way; the right thing, if you were being a solstice purist, would have been to stay up all the night before, but I had a job to do, and these days my hard stimulant limits were a Thermos of tea and a quarter of a Modafinil, and even that turned out to be an error that made me stupid for the whole of the next week. If I’d done the whole thing properly I would have been dead by dawn.
By the time the taxi had crossed the M4 there was light in the north, which might have been there all along. You could make out the hedgerows and the lines of the fields. There were more cars on the lane now, and people wandering along it, some drunkenly brushing the hedgerow, some head-torched and purposeful in neat lines. We reached the Red Lion, the pub at the centre of Avebury, where there were a couple of police vans and clusters of people who were hunched and blanketed and waiting for something to happen. A few event lights lit the crossroad, which seemed an odd way to mark a light-based event.
Much of Avebury’s strangeness derives from this crossroad. It is an archetypally English village built along a lane that intersects a road in a neat cross in the middle of a huge stone circle. It is a tiny and rather smart village, all very National Trust, but then the National Trust is the smart face of eco-morality these days, and that is just a tiptoe away from the old earth religions. The face presented to us now, though, was not very respectable. It was made of many faces, twilit and worse for wear.
There was a big red bin full of cans that, later, turned out to be the drug amnesty bin. It was not really a drug amnesty bin, but an image of one, like those big signs you get in the druggiest clubs restating that drugs are not to be consumed on the premises. Behind it was a gate, with bleary-eyed traffic indicating that we were in the right place, or getting closer to it. There were the round black shapes of stones, blacker than the sky, which was no longer black, and lit from time to time by passing lights. Beneath the stones were human clusters, arrayed with tealights and torches, drinking and smoking and talking and dozing. Behind, somewhere, was a wall of people and noise, and we moved closer to it, and found a high ridge with a chalk path that climbed up past a tree and, everywhere, people.
They were dressed in hats and blankets, huddled around fires and each other, moving around one another in streams and eddies like oversized ants. Oversized, intoxicated ants, passing round vast bottles of cider – always cider, as though to confirm West Country stereotypes – and talking pure nonsense about now and the party and each other, cathartic speech with no purpose other than itself. I suppose they were just being.
We settled under a tree and drank tea there. The sky lightened, the stones loomed larger, the human outlines sharpened. We walked along the ridge, balancing along a shifting path through the gaps between people. Where the grass had worn away, the ground was chalk-white – you could see that now. People with bongos, people with spliffs, people in sleeping bags. A mist pooled in the circular ditch between the ridge and the stones and the people down below, and clung to the gentle rise of the hill behind, where a car’s headlights blurred towards it somewhere. The shape of a quarter-circle of stones became clearer.
We found ourselves tiring of the crowd and its noise and walked along the ridge, following its circle away past other, more sober people. There was a man with a cape and a staff and leather trousers, and a woman in robes, and we followed them. There was a tree, low-branched, the lowest be-ribboned in rainbow colours and gaggled with people playing pop music around its base, where the roots had been eroded into visibility by many gatherings. We crossed a narrow lane, and found the ridge rising again beyond it, quieter now. In the flat behind it were many sheep and a couple of lonely stones and, around them, some more sober figures. They had capes and staffs. The light and the mist rose.
Hoping for some proper druids, we made our way towards them. The sky was pale all over and fire crept around its edge. There was a round stone and a tall stone, guarded by robed people: a fierce-looking middle-aged woman in purple and her gang, who were of a similar age and demeanour. A stout, bearded man in a green robe wore a T-shirt with the Green Man on it. I didn’t want to disturb them. They looked like they were defending their space.
In this field, the serious field, the median age was fifty-something and the vibe meditative. People wore blankety shawls and wild beards that had seen many hilltops, and carried magnificent staffs topped with antlers. They didn’t all look like druids; I had an inkling that the seventy-something woman with the neat white bob and Alice band in the powder-blue anorak and matching skirt was more in tune with the dawning than any of them. Men of a similar age who looked like my dad sat in silent thought. People in BBC lanyards hovered with cameras.
A frame stood at the field’s inside edge, and at some unspoken point gongs were attached to it and then brushed to make a noise at the edge of hearing, a brush or rumble that could have been the wind or the sky, and this sound, or the many sounds that made it, rose with the light until the stern priestess hailed the sun.
Soon enough, it arrived, a brightness without shape in the trees that became a line and then a curve of sharp light. The gongs ceased. The priestess and her gang re-hailed the sun. Distant cries and cheers came from the other side. I held the palms of my hands out, to see if I could feel it, and saw that everyone was doing this, and that the stones were now lit in pink. I did the other instinctive thing that we do to salute events, and took a picture of it on my phone.
A silence fell, the silence that you get when everyone has fallen into a good meal, or after sex, or in the lull of a conversation between old friends. The priestess led a third and final hail. The robes greeted one another, and went off, content.
I started to see why the priestess was fierce when a pissed, toothless bongo player and his friend with the didgeridoo, which may have been a bit of painted guttering, rocked up and planted themselves next to us. If moments could be sacred, and obstacles to their sanctity removed without redress, I would have done away with them right there. They were in the wrong field.
It’s not as though there is anything particularly authentic about dressing up in polyester robes from eBay. I remain unconvinced of the assumptions that the primary purpose of sites such as Avebury, and the enormity of human endeavour that went into making them, would necessarily have been religious – you’d need a degree of political and economic sophistication to get a site like that to happen, and trading and meeting places must have been of at least equal importance. Even if it was, the traditions espoused by the various strands of modern-day pagans date back a century or so at best. But if there are solemnities happening near you, and people using a space within another, larger space to do them in, it really is quite rude to fuck it up for them by disrupting their space.
When I was a raver – or trying to be one, because the intrinsic happy-go-luckiness common to all proper ravers was something I could achieve only with vast and problematic quantities of artificial entheogens – the grim side of the more hippyish raver factions – the psy-trancers, for example, with their neon Hindu deities and mushroom art – would dawn on me at dawn, when the drugs wore off. The greenish complexions of the faces that, sweat-slicked and UV-lit, had looked so happy and alive hours earlier displayed their chemical genesis. Peace and love and unity bickered over taxi fares.
And then there were the casualties, the ones for whom normal life was no longer an opt-in possibility, who could make sense only in this occasional and unnatural sphere where nobody else did. You get bronzed, bendy, bearded old sages on beaches in Goa and Thailand who are still raving, but they tend to integrate it into a life where production and consumption, work and play, exist in some kind of balance. It would be better for most of us to do more playtime that revolves around things beyond the status-trappings of restaurants and dinner-parties and the booze required to tolerate them, but the twitchy old ravers, the have-nots of the party scene, aren’t a great advertisement for it.
There were a lot of them about. I thought again of Emboamboa, the Baka jester-spirit whose job was to be silly, and of Johnny England in Jez Butterworth’s state of the new-age nation play, Jerusalem, who happened to have been portrayed on the original poster as a Green Man, as riotously hammered as a Jack-in-the-Green at the end of the May Day revelries, and anarchic like a woodman should be. I thought of the Happy Mondays’ iconic wreckhead, Bez. Bez wasn’t a one-off. He was an archetype. All cultures had one, and had done so across all time. Bez probably would have had the nous not to play bongos next to the meditating people, though.
It was the zombie hour now. The novelty of the sunrise had worn off, and so had the tea, and it was not yet warm enough to sleep. We looked for a sunny spot on the far side of the ridge and found one, and huddled there on the blanket, listening in on the end-of-night interactions and zombie conversations, the wandering people needing to talk, to anybody and about nothing. There was a man with a tattooed face which broadcast a need for attention that he now assiduously sought by means of aggressive banter at anyone who’d listen, or who wouldn’t. A well-meaning creative writing student patiently held forth on the perils of misogynistic language to a black-clad lad able to respond only in grunts. We couldn’t face the party field, because there would be more bongos in it.
The shouty man with the tattooed face was still trolling the people who would listen. Not many of them would now – the outer edge of the ridge was lined with sleeping bags and blankets, and bodies in them. Only the hardcore people remained, and they all had bongos.
An incident, which may or may not have been supernatural in provenance, happened as we passed them: M, whose movements are neat and accurate, and who was a talented footballer in his youth, tripped, his foot sending a bongo flying down the hill, where it rolled to a stop in the last thread of mist in the ditch. Its owner, if bongos can be owned, did not notice. M, who is a faultlessly honest person, maintains that this was an accident, a slip of the foot occurring in tiredness, but I suspected it to be a Freudian kick, or, more accurately, a subconscious enactment of the will of a greater force. I suppose that it is also possible that the grazes he sustained running down the hill to retrieve the bongo were supposed to happen, although whether they were for kicking the bongo or retrieving it remains open to interpretation. We needed tea.
The National Trust cafe had set up a breakfast stall by the bus stop. The tea was hot and the bacon dense and smoky; I experienced a strong rush of emotion, a conviction that we needed more of the National Trust, ideally as a benevolent dictatorial presence governing England and its mores. It was a very good breakfast. Z, who had been to Stonehenge and was on her way, texted to see if we were awake. We made our way along the lane that formed the village, past the Henge shop, where I got my father a handsome staff for his birthday and a leaflet about sacred energy lines, hoping for a map in it.
We wandered up towards the church, where there was a poster advertising a Celtic service at nine. I thought of L, the Church of England vicar with his Celtic-pagan bent, and realised that there were more of him than we had thought. Having a little church, a temple to the weird mystery religion of Christianity, in the middle of this other, vastly bigger religious site, was a reorientation of normal in which the Church had to set out a pagan-friendly liturgy in order to fit in. We set an alarm for five to nine, and went back to the stones, which were warm, to sleep.
We slept through the alarm, and I only woke when Z arrived. We had met once before, seven years ago, at night under a huge cypress tree at a festival in Clyro, but she was instantly recognisable. Z is small in stature and elfin-faced, and grew up in the house where J. M. Barrie wrote Peter Pan. You could cast her as a convincing fairy. She may well be one, and probably wouldn’t be offended if you asked her.
Her family, which was aristocratic in the best way, entangled with eccentric overachievement and self-effacing about its provenance, had a house a couple of miles away that backed onto a valley that Z and her siblings grew up calling Woody Dene; she had recently discovered Woody to be a corruption of Woden, the ur-Green Man. She wanted to check in on her strawberries anyway, so we got in the car and went there, past the West Kennet Avenue of standing stones and a lane with lines of converted ambulances and ancient camper vans that the itinerant New Agers lived in.
Z ran away with New Age travellers as a teenager and spent a few years on the road with them, in the days when they got beaten up by police and their children taken away into care. On Solstice day in 1985, a phalanx of armed riot police set upon a line of camper vans known as the Peace Convoy as it approached Stonehenge, wrecking the vehicles and dragging whatever was in them out – men, women, children, dogs. The dazed travellers escaped where they could into neighbouring fields. It wasn’t what they were expecting – for years previously, Stonehenge had hosted the Stonehenge Free Festival every solstice where people of hippyish orientation would rock up for a week and celebrate the summer in peace.
The rest of the eighties was underscored by the threat of more of the same, and a four-mile exclusion zone created around the fenced-off stones and patrolled by police on horseback. Hanging about at stone circles was a heresy, stuff for Satanists and an unwashed underculture. A persistent druid who called himself King Arthur Pendragon was arrested annually.
In 1989, a couple of years after the Summer of Love parties had started up around the M25, the New Age travellers found their ranks swollen with ravers. A few of them broke into Stonehenge and danced on the stones. The exact nature of the hippy-raver sympathy is something that eludes me, because I was far too young to be out in a field back then. However, the way that normal people with normal jobs and lives in normal suburban England found themselves dancing in a field at dawn, in a fashion that was no doubt similar to what the travellers had always done, moving from free party to free party, and the way that behaviour became normal for those normal people, of whom there were many, must have had something to do with it.
We think of the sixties and seventies as the time of great social change, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius or simply a softening of Victorian cultural strictures. But the changes that happened then, so far as the mainstream of British culture was concerned, were pretty trivial compared to the nineties. For people who weren’t rich and educated and in the tiny, rarefied rock-star circles that swung and travelled and experimented with drugs and thinking, the sixties and seventies took place on a small dark island full of people who went to church, trusted institutions and conformed.
You could make a case for people’s drug culture shaping their mindset, and say that the privileged minority of that generation who did the hippy trail and concomitant bits of psychedelic culture used their status to do good things with their newly opened minds. If that was true, the impact of Ecstasy was overwhelmingly greater on the British people at large. Those synthetic hours of joy and trust didn’t just make people dance all night, but hang out with each other and talk too.
Maybe the solidarity was ephemeral, and faded as the sun rose, and maybe it was chemical, a matter of misfired serotonin that would hurt a few days later, but for a moment in time it altered the way people were with each other and the world, and forged new connections in their millions. Even if you feel like crying a few days into an E comedown, you don’t forget the night of mashed conversation and empathy with the random people you met and shared backrubs with. These were mass memories, and shaped a mass understanding of what constituted a good time, and a mass trust of other people in their diverse forms.
The hippies and the travellers, with their festival-centred calendar and pagan sensibilities, formed the spaces where this all took place. The seeds of alternative culture which were sown in the sixties and scattered in remote corners of the land in the seventies flourished into a bigger, noisier and more mainstream New Age movement by the nineties. The Conservative government, in its death throes, outlawed public gatherings with music ‘wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’, but by then the parties were everywhere, and my class of prepubescent twelve-year-olds wore Global Hypercolor T-shirts with Smiley logos on them. The battle had been lost.
By 1999, English Heritage were issuing pre-booked tickets to Stonehenge, but vetting them to ensure the travellers didn’t get in. The druids and the travellers stood outside as a trickle of acceptably normal people entered. A face-off with the police ensued. By 2000, the police didn’t want the trouble any longer, and decided to let the party happen, since it was going to anyway. The Stonehenge revelries grew and grew. This year, Z said, was a year of celebration for the travellers, because it was the first time in thirty years that they had been let back in with music to the stones.
We drove through a perfect English village of thatched houses and immaculate lawns, and down a lane past a field strewn with huge stones like those at Avebury. We pulled into Z’s driveway, by a picture-book cottage, and sat on a swing under a tall yew looking down Woden’s Dene, a long valley of meadow bounded by woods, and in the middle of it more rocks, vast rocks, as though they had been thrown down by giants or gods in play.
She took us through the valley, her dog running off in the long meadow and popping up now and then by a rock. Some of the rocks had straight edges down the side formed by human hands, and some had straight cracks down the middle, as though they had been cut ready for something but were too big or awkward to move.
How the rocks got there was a mystery – they are thought to be post-glacial remains and are known as Sarsen stones, a Wiltshire corruption of ‘Saracen’ from a time when Saracens were Muslims and Muslims, as non-Christians, were lumped together with all the other non-Christians, pagans included. It was, in an etymological meander, a way of stating a sense of a religious otherness.
Z spent her childhood playing in the stones and the trees around them. Naming the place after a Teutonic forest-god seemed to fit the context of her family quite well. Her father was named after the old Saxon outlaw smith-god Wayland, and she had described her family mindset as ‘Spinozist’.
We’d talked a little about Spinoza earlier, the Enlightenment’s best heretic. Spinoza held that everything in the world is an attribute of one base substance, which he called ‘God, or Nature’. In the original Latin, it reads Deus sive Natura, and sive is an ‘or’ denoting the interchangeability of God and Nature, so that it is either one or the other, and the one might be the other. The oneness of this base substance, whatever you want to call it, sits in sharp contrast with the Cartesian notion of the split between the mechanical physical world of the body and of objects and the thinking substance of mind and of God.
For Spinoza, the God-or-Nature substance manifests in endless variations with their own distinct characteristics and identities, but there is no distinction between the mind and body as separate entities. Everything has a mind, or a consciousness, or a will; there is no distinction between plants or animals or rivers as being mechanistic, mindless things while humans are uniquely endowed with Godlike consciousness, like there is in Descartes.
The more you read of Spinoza, the more counterintuitive Descartes’s messy metaphysics becomes. Apart from one dodgy line of reasoning that seeks to prove the existence of God, which everyone probably had to do no matter what they were trying to argue in order not to be burned at the stake, everything in Spinoza makes perfect sense in that retrospectively obvious way.
I can see that Cartesianism suited the power structures of the Church and of monarchy, in creating layers of special Godlike consciousness available only to special people, but apart from that it doesn’t make much sense. And yet that was the way of understanding the world and the stuff in it that dominated through the Enlightenment, and whose conception of the uniqueness of humanity still prevails.
I liked the term Spinozist. I had found myself using an analogue of it accepted in today’s academic philosophy, panpsychism, which baffled people outside of it, and vowed to use Spinozist instead. We walked past the line of oaks and hawthorns that marked some ancient border, past the big, pitted rocks, into longer and longer grass until the wood thickened and we turned back. An elder was in full bloom, heavy-scented in the midday sun. The grass brushed our shoulders and a pair of buzzards circled above.
Z dropped us at the avenue and we walked for a mile or so in the high sun, passing the male and female stones and the people camped out at the base of them. It was like a festival, but better than a festival, because there was nothing in particular to see or do – we were not distracted from distraction by distraction.
The oldest festivals were probably like Avebury or Stonehenge at midsummer: the music was incidental to the gathering, if people felt like making some, but it was really just about enjoying a passing moment for what it was. The moment, place and people were the thing. Glastonbury started like that too, but outside in the real world music was an industry and people came to expect it in industrial form and quantities, and so it came to pass that there was a perimeter fence like the Berlin Wall, and Metallica headlining.
I had hoped to go on the road to Stonehenge and then follow the New Age travellers to Glastonbury, but Stonehenge was heaving and unreachable, and I hadn’t managed to get tickets to Glastonbury – the days of crawling through the bushes to sneak in, as my less-square student comrades used to do, were long gone. Instead I found myself back at the school gate between adventures, comparing weekend notes and apologising for not attending a number of competing local solstice advents.
There was the festival celebrating the rock ’n’ roll hill farmer who died the year before, and a fortieth birthday party up on Hay Bluff, where, I had been assured, there would be sun salutations by standing stones, and all the hippies I could handle. This latter event was hosted by a vet, as staunchly rationalist in her worldview as you would hope of someone whose job is to operate on your dog, and who nonetheless professed to have found the solstice celebration delightful, even magical. Someone whose older child was at the local public school, populated by the scions of army families and rich farmers, said that they had been out climbing Pen-y-Fan all night in time for dawn.
At the point when I realised that Glastonbury was not going to happen, and that in an era when my parents watched it on telly this was probably not the end of the world, Z mentioned Mazey Day. Z lives in Cornwall, which is unsurprising, because it is the sunniest of the various bits of Celtic fringe and she was bound to be in one of them. Having missed the Helston Furry Dance, the prospect of finding something like it, which she described as riotous magic, or a magical riot, sounded good.
The train from Plymouth was small and ancient and it belted along the line, over a high bridge across the watery divide between Devon and Cornwall at Devonport, and through stations with signals that looked like they were last used as a prop in a war film and with names that seemed misspelled. It took more than two hours to cross the county, past strange earthworks that turned out to be tin mines and rivers and hillsides and stations where people, who seemed to be happier than the Welsh average, perhaps because the sun shone here, got on and off with shopping bags, talking of the weekend.
Cornwall looked very like Pembrokeshire, which if anything is more Arthurian in character with its rolling hills and rocky outcrops undisrupted by Londoners, except Cornwall was full of people and they were all deeply suntanned. In the Welsh borders we start to disrobe when it gets warmer than the eighteen degrees of the summer mean; that doesn’t happen very often, and even the smallest town will have a beautician whose main income stream comes from spraying people orange because it will never happen naturally.
Here, the sun prevailed. The sea was dark blue and clear, even by the dry dock, where heads of swimmers edged out under the bridge and past the boats into the sea. I was envious of them: I’d been swimming only once so far this year, in the river behind the woods behind my house, and found it murky and uncomfortably forceful.
I bought a swimsuit in a charity shop and went in. The water was heart-stoppingly cold, grasping every pore and muscle so that you had to thrash about like a mad thing to survive the first few minutes. Then the peculiar mental peace that comes from frenetic physical exertion came upon me, and there was sea and sky and St Michael’s Mount and the rocks, like a film set spray-painted all around, and by the time I got out I was ferociously hungry and the sun no longer felt warm enough, and I went to bed to get some warmth and fell into a deep sleep.
I woke up to the sound of gunshot, and listened to it, half-sleeping and confused. It exploded in great bangs and then trailed off, and the sounds of different guns rang out, and I realised that it was the sound of fireworks, and that they were nearby. I got up and went outside.
You can feel a crowd of people before you see it, the weird crowd-energy it gives off. The fairground had changed character, and in place of the kids in their candy-coloured tops were older, darker folk, drunk and chaotic and moving in human tides from one place to another, although there was no obvious pattern to them. Some were dressed as pirates; some were dressed in black with white crosses, in Cornish allegiance, but the overall effect was pleasingly like the Antichrist. Someone emerged from the fortune-teller’s caravan. Somewhere there were drums, which were not the same as the noisy poppy techno coming from the fairground rides. These drums were being played by human hands, and many of them, and the drums and the hands were coming closer from wherever it was they were.
Torches flickered along a narrow alleyway behind a pub. I left the fairground and made my way towards it, at odds with the rush of people moving downhill. I moved back with them and we pooled at the bottom by the quayside, waiting. You could hear other sounds now, pipes or flutes or something like them, weaving in and out of the drum-beat. A large, unwieldy figure made its way along, attended by eddies of riotous dancers, and as it drew closer it took on the shape of an animal whose head was the skull of a large beast, decked with garlands, and with a body of black rags which shimmied about as it moved.
The torches bobbed about in the black sky. More rain fell, and they burned. The procession moved along, meandering through the crowd, and bits of the crowd followed it. I tried to follow too, but a sober incomer in a sea of drunken orgiasts doesn’t stand a chance.
The Cornish Obby Oss ritual is probably one of the oldest surviving British folk rituals. The Obby Oss is most closely associated with May Day, where, in Padstow, the black Oss takes to the streets and snaps up any passing maiden of its fancy. There is a particular style of what we might otherwise call morris dancing that is associated with the Oss: it is called teazing, or guising, and is a sort of moving act of flirtation in which the Oss is kept in a state of high party arousal, and so is the crowd.
People who have run successful clubs and bars speak of ‘building a room’ or ‘building a vibe’ as an art, one that requires constant and focused attention. There are things and people that raise the energy, and there are those that sap it. Turning a street full of observers into a swirling mass of revelry is not something that happens spontaneously, even if they are drunk enough for this to seem to be the case.
If, like the inert cagoule-people of Clun, you don’t hold much truck with the idea that big and involved ritual acts derive their power from some sort of collective will, or energy, or whatever you want to call it, revelries become exercises of chemically induced delusion and events become things performed by the few for the many.
Unticketed street parties can still sometimes do things the old way, where everyone present, or most of them, get inveigled into the dance, so that the party subsumes them into a messy whole. It was happening, in a fashion, here, and I wished I’d been more prepared for it, so that I could have been in more vigorous spirits.
The Obby Oss procession wasn’t exactly advertised. Mazey Day is the endpoint of the week-long Golowan festival, which derived from the Tansys Golowan, or midsummer fires, which were lit from beacon to beacon to celebrate the solstice, and this became a fire-lit street party before somehow transforming into the other, respectable sort of festival. The fires couched their heritage in the Christianised date range of St John’s Eve to St Peter’s Eve, and the name derives from the Cornish for St John, but they existed long before the Church got hold of them. The fires were revived during the folkloric renaissance of the early twentieth century, a time when you might say that folkloric became a tacit substitute-term for pagan in its original Roman sense of paganus, being of the county. There is nothing more pagan than lighting up the sky as far as you can see with bonfires at midsummer.
The official Golowan programme, replete with advertisements for B&Bs with sea views and sponsored by the local college, was good on listing sedate things: the daytime parades of twin town banners, the schools and their floats, the international marching bands. I asked a man in an official T-Shirt about the Oss, hoping to see it again, on better form, on Mazey Day, and he looked blank. A woman next to him said it was a Mazey Eve thing, to celebrate the mock mayor of the quay. I think I caught a glimpse of him, and that he was a pirate, but this didn’t really narrow it down; a lot of people were dressed as pirates.
There was a distinct town/quay divide, in which the advertised activities took place in the disarmingly named Market Jew Street and the real stuff happened on the quayside. A controversy broke out a few years ago when the founder of the Penglaz Co-operative, the group who revived the Obby Oss tradition to protect the ritual character of Golowan, was ousted by the festival committee’s new director. It happened to be that the founder had recently married her partner, who was also female, and also a Wisewoman, or witch, and that the handfasting ceremony had been front-page news in the local paper, whose motivations were unclear. The director announced that Golowan needed to maintain its secular character and that her involvement, which made the festival a pagan-religious exercise, was inappropriate.
In one of the side streets, the Methodist chapel was doing a roaring trade. It boasted a running order of musical events that were very much on-programme as far as Golowan was concerned: Celtic fiddle bands, Christian folk acts, dancing, the works. It wasn’t so much that Golowan needed to be a secular activity, more that it needed not to be pagan.
The pagan controversy story, which would have passed me by if I hadn’t nearly missed the dockside procession the night before, and hadn’t been irritated about it, offers an interesting little snapshot of a common story I’d heard from many occultists: ancient spiritual acts and traditions excised from public space.
The ridiculous thing about it all is that even if it was witchcraft – and in a way you could say it is, it all is, for harnessing the magic of crowds is a pretty magical thing to do – nobody would notice or care now. The Methodist church hosting all those acceptable music events took care to brand them as Celtic, in that vein of churchy pagan semiotics that I’d seen at Avebury and with S.
But no entity in the world is less aware of the rise and fall of cultural waves than local officialdom, and so the old, famous, deeply Cornish pagan ritual of Penzance persisted in billing itself as a secular and international festival. They can call it what they like – I stood behind middle-aged women with deep-tan décolletages and garlands in their hair, holding their granddaughters aloft in Disney Princess dresses and floral facepaints, all of them watching the parades.
I remember watching an Easter parade as a child on holiday in Spain where a dead Jesus was carried through the streets. We’re over crucifixes and saints here now, thank goodness, and most children in primary schools don’t have to look up at a dying man looking painfully down at them, like I did during a brief stint at school in France. Here, instead, they build vast floats shaped like dragons and serpents and butterflies, and wave bright sequinned flowers in the air. Forms of life, real and mythological, are being celebrated, which is how it should be.
The little girls in their princess robes cheered on their older siblings as they went past. Even in the sanitised form that sits comfortably with primary schools, the secular bugs and plants on the floats were vast enough to be used for ritual purposes and looked a little like nature worship. If you checked their websites, I bet they all had Forest School and Eco School status. Middle England is going pagan. We may be secular, but we still like a bit of ritual, and plants and animals are nicer than tortured dead people.
I dozed in a park full of strange imported plants that all seemed out of scale, like in Wonderland, and I watched the comings and goings of pirates and babies and more little girls in princess dresses. Maybe the princess-dress thing was actually pagan-medieval in allure, like the robes were for grown-ups. I reconsidered the Disney Princess genre. You had to acknowledge, at the very least, that the Tinkerbell movies were explicitly pagan in character; maybe the dresses were about being in a place where magic still happened. The little boys who weren’t pirates were dressed as Native Americans, with headdresses and facepaint, some trailing dreamcatchers; there were no cowboys. The unofficial dress code here was either anarchic or earth-spiritual. I felt as though I should have made more of an effort.
The Serpent Dance was the last dance of the day, and did not go down the main street, but turned towards the quay. As we followed it, hurrying through the crowd to catch up, I wondered whether the old dances with their ritual qualities were dispatched to the quay, down the unrespectable end of town where the pirates hung out and away from the respectable normality of the main street. I’d heard it said that there were often rituals and celebrations at these sorts of affairs that, if not secret, were left unprogrammed, or kept for an inner circle of people to attend.
It was not clear how much of this permission came from above or below, whether heavy-handed festival organisers like the Penzance pagan-basher actively sought to distance the strangeness from the tourists, or whether, as Z said was the case in other, angrier Cornish towns, the people just wanted a bit of space from gawping, uninvolved emmets, which seemed fair enough.
The Serpent Dance became more serpentine, pooling in a crossroad and looping around and back on itself in concentric circles. Z spotted R, a witch she knew whom she’d met at Stonehenge at solstice, and someone from her tango class. The serpent grew longer, acquiring people along the way. Apparently, dances like these once lasted for days, with chains of people dancing across the country from village to village, so that the dance grew and grew and its constitution shifted as people came and went from it. Now the whole street was in the dance, young and old, led by the morris-men playing their looping tune, and the tune was distant and secondary to the laughing and the beat of feet along the lane.
The dance ended at the quay, and we met R, who was dressed in green from head to toe with skirts that swirled in the dance. She had performed a new moon ritual on a hilltop that morning, and was reluctantly heading back to London after a wild swim somewhere to the north, where the sun would set.
R and her partner had been on a ten-day solstice road trip to the West, starting at Stonehenge. Along the way they had met some kids, just seventeen years old, who were army recruits. After six weeks of training they were off to Iraq – they’d just been told. They had the weekend to get themselves together and pack. R and her partner asked if they would like to come to Stonehenge with them. They asked what it was. R explained that it was an ancient sacred site, that the stones had magic qualities, and that in a few hours it would be full of people celebrating the solstice. The kids wanted protection in Iraq. R said she’d see what she could do.
They were some of the first to arrive at the stones. Together with the other people there they made a circle and R asked for protection for the soldiers, and, tacitly, that they should bring protection to others. If they were going to Iraq, she wanted them going as peacekeepers. As the ritual took place, the stones filled up: people were arriving now in hundreds and then thousands ready for the big party. The recruits saw the circle grow and thicken and were impressed. They thanked R and went off to party with the others, dropping by at intervals during the night to thank her and express delighted disbelief at the whole scene.
Whatever your position on magic, those kids came out of Stonehenge with a sense of safety and a trust in the beneficence of other people that would do them good, and might lead them to do good too. You could describe the mechanism by which this outcome might happen as the flow of unseen energies, or as a spell, or simply as an exchange of trust with others and the world. I liked R; she seemed sane and good and happy. She went off to swim.
We went off to the pub with L, a friend of Z’s who lived in Penzance. The Admiral Benbow was one of the most eccentric pubs I’d ever been in. Even by Penzance standards, where everything is piratical in character, it was heavy on the naval references. Behind the bar was a long shelf of Toby jugs, like a row of grotesque corbels, and figureheads the size of giants popped up here and there around snugs and behind tables, and a huge ship’s wheel nearly touched the low ceiling of the bar. You didn’t need more than half a pint of cider to find it a disorienting experience.
Z and L talked about their shamanic training group, with whom they were still close, and about the dynamics within it, and their teacher, who they liked a great deal. They went into the woods on vision quests, where they sat alone, fasting and meditating, and learned techniques from various indigenous cultures: Native Americans, Siberian shamans, whatever worked. There was no particular dogma to the right way to approach things, and they did not see what they did as having a particular heritage either. It was about getting better at being.
The root of the things that we commonly call pagan lies in the same sort of thing – it is just that some people refine their practices into a certain technique that they then feel to be correct, and they teach it to others, and it becomes a thing with a name that some people adhere to, distinguishable from the other things with names. The term ‘pagan’, Z and L agreed, was problematic, because it gave a label to too many different things and made images of witches and purple, when really it was, or should, be all about being.
Even the pagans, insofar as we can call them that, as though they are a single entity, or even an entity, made their own, smaller, institutions and policed them. Z was down on this. Stonehenge had been left strewn with bottles and rubbish, as you’d expect when thirty-six thousand people have a party in a confined space. Some of the serious spiritual people complained about that – they didn’t like a sacred monument defiled by litter, and, perhaps, unseriousness. It was as though the frivolity, rather than its trace, troubled them. Z didn’t have much time for people who were into authenticity, or attached to ritual – she described the robes and ritual as a twentieth-century invention, and was unimpressed by the need to legislate for one’s beliefs, because that’s where you get into the same territory as organised religion, and it no longer had much spirit left in it.
Z and L wanted to go out dancing. L went home to sort out babysitting with his wife, and Z went to put her dog to bed. I walked down the bright lane to the sea. The town centre was empty now, and the distant vibration of many voices on the quayside rang up again. That was where the action was now. A hotel on the seafront had set up a stage, and already the dancefloor was full, and spilling out onto the pavement and the road, which the police were starting to block off with cones. A party was brewing.
The sun caught St Michael’s Mount so that it stood out gold in the sea, which was calm and glassy. A tide of people came, slowly at first, and then in dense streams from the town and the quay, filling up the whole road with cidery laughter. I walked through the town, going nowhere in particular, going down side streets that fed back to where I had come from, going round in circles. The top of the town was cold and still, and the sky darkened.
At some point I ended up back at the seafront. The whole road was a moving mass of people. Somewhere within it, on the wall by the stage, were Z and L and his wife and their friends, beaming and shaking like proper ravers, the type whose only drug is the moment.
‘If you have to call something pagan,’ said L, ‘this, right here, with the sea and the sky and the people celebrating it all: this is pagan.’
And so they danced.