The Festival is Over...Nearly

All in all and despite the weather I've had a legendary summer hopping from festival to festival, campfire to campfire, gig to gig. It's just how I like it.

Here's Telling the Bees, ready to go on stage at the Bulverton Marquee, Sidmouth.

And this was taken round the fire at Uncivilisation, the gathering of the Dark Mountain Project, waiting to hear Rima and Tom tell strange Siberian stories late into the night.

In between festivals we got some good walking in, and from time to time the sun shone.

This seasonal, summer, peripatetic lifestyle keeps me sane. The thought of being indoors through the summer months fills me with dread, and the times I've had to do it have left me morose, lethargic and depressed. The prospect of winter becomes unbearable.

But, of course, the summer comes to an end. There's only Moseley Folk Festival to go, already there's a hint of autumn in the night air, and soon the students will be back and term will have begun again.

Sneakily, I've managed to inject a little summer into the Religious Studies course at Oxford Brookes (where I've taught part-time for seven years). I teach a module on 'Festivals in Religion and Culture.' Fear not - it isn't all practical - I use it as a vehicle to teach some heavyweight theory too. Though I say it myself, I'm pretty proud of it: it's exactly the kind of course I'd want to take if I were an undergraduate. We have a lot of fun with it.

And believe it or not, there are students who've never heard of Stonehenge Free Festival (you mean, you didn't have to pay?), or the Battle of the Beanfield, or who think that festivals mean big corporate events with big stages and big names and a hefty ticket price too. It's my duty to educate people, no?

So here's the blurb to give you just a little taster.


Festivals, and going to festivals, have never been so popular. In 2010 one in ten British adults went to a festival. There are currently over four hundred different events in the UK, from large, famous festivals such as Glastonbury and Reading, to smaller, so-called boutique festivals, like Wood, Green Man and the Secret Garden Party. There are festivals for every taste, inclination and identity. People go to listen to their favourite bands, to camp and be outdoors, to experiment with alternative ideas and lifestyles, to meet sexual partners, to party and, of course, to take (mostly illicit) drugs.

While the 'rock festival' is a modern, Western, post-war development, festivals per se are ancient and more often than not bound up with religion. We will examine a range of religious festivals to ask why so many religions have felt the need for large, social, festive occasions. How it is that a religion like Catholicism, concerned as it is with correct moral behaviour, allowed and tolerated Carnival, a time of license, transgression and excess? To what extent are rock festivals, in spite of their secular origins, expressions of religiosity or spirituality?

As a significant if controversial aspect of contemporary popular culture festivals raise all manner of questions and merit serious scholarly attention. In this part of the module we will attempt to answer these questions using theories drawn from Religious Studies, Sociology and Anthropology. We shall examine a range of different festivals, secular and religious, ancient and modern.

Between us, at least, we shall keep the summer alive.

Jerusalem

I made a grave error of judgement earlier this year, one that I shall long regret. I forget how many people begged, cajoled and implored me to go and see Jez Butterworth's play Jerusalem when it was on at the Apollo. But, put off by the ticket price, I dithered and when finally I decided to go it was long sold out.

Mark Rylance played the lead, the beautifully complex anti-hero Johnny 'Rooster' Byron, to unanimously rave reviews. More than just engaging audiences with the play's themes of Englishness, place, the countryside, belonging, rebellion (teenage and otherwise), and rites of passage, Rylance's performance seemed to leave people physically shaken, as though he had actually invoked the ancient, atavistic powers that suffuse the text. I should have gone. I'm a fool and I know it.

Second best, I've just read the play, but even imagining Rylance as Rooster proved enough to invoke its strange powers. I was genuinely moved and shaken. As soon as I'd finished I had to read it all over again, the second time no less powerfully than the first. Like Coleridge's glitteringly eyed Ancient Mariner I've been thrusting the text on my friends: 'You have to read this!' I'm urging you, too.

I can't really say much about why I think the play is so extraordinary without spoiling the plot. But I think, as Butterworth and Rylance say towards the end of this interview, it's because the play is an anguished cry for the importance of mythos in our logos-driven world. Logos is about rationalism, calculation, straight-lines and ticked-boxes. It's about career-ladders and life lived according to a plan. It's the housing estate that engulfs the woods. Mythos is, well...even to try and define it is to reduce it to logos, to make it something that it isn't. We can only look at mythos askance, from the corner of our eyes. But we know its warped and twisted shape when we see it. We feel its effects viscerally.

So here's to the outlaws, the outsiders, the madmen and the magicians, the Roosters of this world, who give their lives to mythos and make the world shake.

Caput Draconis

The eve of my birthday took us to Hampshire and the South Downs for a seven mile walk from Beacon Hill to Old Winchester Hill (which you can just see on the horizon).

After Dartmoor and the Cornish coast, the southern English downs provide some of my favourite walks. They roll and undulate like cresting sea creatures, lifting you up to their silent summits before dropping away again, leaving you agog at the views. To be up on the downs is to be closer to the gods, as I think the ancients knew. Like so many before me, it's where I go to yearn.

Well-trodden paths lead on to old places.

Poisonous-looking plants hang in hedgerows. Secretive yellowhammers call for 'a little bit of bread and no cheese'.

You never want to tarry long because there's always something interesting round the corner.

Eventually we arrived at the foot of Old Winchester Hill. It's a nature reserve, topped with Bronze Age barrows and a much later Iron Age Hillfort. An easy climb took us to the top.

The views are stunning, not that these photos really do them justice. It could be the top of the world for all I know.

We sat in the lea of a barrow for tea and flapjack, but our rest was cut short by ticks, horrid onomatopoeias.

Old Winchester Hill is not only famous for its archaeology, butterflies and wildflowers but for the yew wood that hugs its sides. It's a restful and slightly eerie place. Nothing grows over those poisonous roots.

The last time I was there I slept in this wood. It was April 1996, the height of the road-protests and not long after my eviction from Newbury. Someone called a gathering, a magical gathering at Old Winchester Hill, and word spread quickly. What happened has gone down in legend.

According to our protesters' magical-realist mythology, a great sleeping dragon stretched out across the downs, from Saint Catherine's Hill at Winchester to Old Winchester Hill, the spirit of the land. The great scar of the M3 motorway cutting through Twyford Down had not only ravaged a site of great beauty and scientific interest: it had also severed the dragon's head. Like characters from a forgotten Anglo-Saxon epic, we endeavoured to put things right. A friend explains:

When you cut the tail off a lizard it grows another one. So having cut the head off the body and the tail of the dragon, it was then able to grow another one. We went to the original head of the dragon at St Catherine's Hill, and camped there for a few nights and had a massive party on the last night. We had a big fire and there was full-on singing and drumming and fire-swirling and everything. The next morning we pilgrimaged fourteen miles along the body of the dragon, over the broken neck, carrying some of the coals from the fire that we'd lit before. We lit another fire at a place called Beacon Hill, and then down to Winchester Hill, which was in effect the tail of the dragon, which was renamed as the head of the dragon. And it was incredible when we got there, cos hundreds of people turned up, many more people than had done the walk. It was so obvious that this was the new head, this was where the energy was.

I was one of the people there to greet the pilgrims. I remember fire and face-painting, and a wickerwork dragon's head with great big eyes that we processed to the end of the hill with bagpipes and drums. There was a play, and at its climax, a lunar eclipse where everything went blood red. And afterwards I fell asleep to the sound of the wind sussurating through those ancient yews.

Were we healing the land or ourselves? Was there really a dragon? I don't know. I'm not sure it matters. But Old Winchester Hill remains the kind of place where legends are made. Going there changes you.

But I do remember this. The Dongas Tribe, the original road-protesters at Twyford Down, made a wickerwork dragon sculpture that they placed at Old Winchester Hill. In one of those curious pieces of synchronicity, when we got there to do our dragon-healing ritual we found that while it was otherwise intact, the head was nowhere to be found...