Bagpipes and borders

Some people hate the bagpipes. Fair enough.

But when they tell me this I remind them that in all probability it's the Great Highland Bagpipe they don't like. For all its skirling power to move people to tears or to battle, the GHB is inarguably loud and comes bundled with a lot of military associations that many dislike.

Bagpipes, I go on, are indigenous to the Middle East, North Africa, the whole of Europe – east and west – and are found as far away as India. With 130 kinds of bagpipe in the world to choose from, why not check out the Bulgarian kaba gaida or the Cretan askomandoura or the Slovakian gajdy? You might find one you like.

Originating in Antiquity, bagpipes were the Fender Stratocaster of the Middle Ages. Their function has ever been to make people dance, preferably all night and till they drop. As they say in Bulgaria, "a wedding without a bagpipe is like a funeral".

One of the many things I love about playing the bagpipes – in my case, the modern English border pipes – is that this ancient, obscure instrument acts as a kind of passport. I have bagpiping friends across the whole of the UK, but also in France, Germany, Belgium, Galicia, Greece, Estonia, Slovakia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Russia and the US. Consequently a warm welcome awaits me pretty much wherever I go.

We may have little in common. We may not be able to speak the same language. But music, and bagpiping, bring us together in common cause and act as a kind of shared language. Here's one of my tunes, now, let's hear one of yours. Oh I see: that's how you ornament that tune.

Bagpiping gives me a route straight to the heart of another culture. As pipers we can talk about how life is for us, what matters to us individually and culturally, what makes us tick. How are things in your shoes?

I find this thrilling. I am insatiably curious. The prospect of meeting someone from another culture means opportunity, excitement, and the chance to learn something new.

Not everyone feels this way. I woke yesterday to discover that my country has voted to turn inwards and leave the EU. It is not the result I wanted.

I'm not going to launch into a political speech here. I simply want to say in the coming months I fully expect insularity and fear of the Other to become predominant themes in British and European politics. They already are in America. That frightens me.

Now, more than ever, I think we need to find ways of reaching out across the arbitrary borders we construct around ourselves. That may be through political allegiance, artistic endeavour, religion and spirituality, gender and sexuality, music, or a nerdy interest in the bagpipes. How we do it doesn't matter. We need to find the points of overlap.

If we don't then I fear the hard won lessons of the twentieth century will go unheeded. Choosing certainty over surprise, the world will become a much duller and more scary place.

The Way of the Morris

More neatly than marmite, bagpipes or the EU referendum, the question of Morris dancing divides the nation. For many it is, as folk musician Chris Wood puts it, the thing you cross the road to avoid. I've always been rather fond of it.

I like the formal Cotswold style, with its bells and hankies, but I especially like Border Morris, originating in the Welsh-English borders, with its tattered clothes, be-feathered top hats, clacking sticks and general scary demeanour. I'll stop and watch dancers of all kinds if I see them in the streets.

Much folklore has accrued around the subject of Morris dancing, especially to do with its supposed origins in an ancient pagan fertility cult. The fertility theory seems pretty implausible when you watch some of the, ahem, less virile sides splutter and wheeze their way through a dance, and in fact, Morris dancing began life in the Tudor Court, perhaps mimicking 'Moorish spectacles' in Spain.

From there it spread to the streets where it remains to this day. The top hats and the feathers are two-fingers raised to the aristocracy. We'll wear your fine clothes and we'll poach your pheasants while we're about it.

For many now Morris dancing is a fun and social activity, one that gets you out and keeps you active. But the notion that Morris dancing has pagan origins has implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, inspired many of today's sides. Meanings change. Who knows whether Morris dancers of yore danced the sun up on May 1st, but they do now, and that has a rightness to it.

These themes were touched on beautifully in the documentary, The Way of the Morris, and if you're a waverer, I strongly recommend you watch it.

There is, of course, the vexed question of whether in a multi-cultural society it's acceptable for Morris dancers to blacken their faces. I've hummed and hawed about this but am of the firm belief there's no case to answer because it has absolutely nothing to do with 'blacking up'.

Irrespective of the historical justifications that are offered for the practice, it's all about intention.

Dressing up as a 'Black and White Minstrel' or to ape and lampoon an ethnic minority in any way is offensive and objectionable. If that's what Morris dancers did, I would be their fiercest critic.

But spend five minutes watching them and you'll see that the blackened faces have nothing to do with parody and everything to do with mask, with ritual, and with temporarily leaving the humdrum world behind.

Our local Dartmoor side, Beltane Morris, paint their faces because when they dance they embody the ravens who call the Moor home. Theirs is a bit of homegrown theriomorphism.

When the Seven Champions Molly dancers raise their hands to the sky, it is as if they are summoning up the spirit of the corn itself (Molly dancing is the East Anglian tradition). The effect is otherworldly and mesmerising.

And as if to hammer the point home, the Wild Hunt Border Morris actually wear masks.

If you watch one of the better sides dance until the spirit seems to grip hold of them, you realise that something odd and intangible is happening. Pagan or not, the Morris has become some kind of implicit folk ritual, a rite that allows something in and through, something that touches and transforms us, that connects our feet to the soil just as surely as it raises the hairs on the back of the neck.

You may feel that Morris dancing has nothing for you. I urge you to look again.

It's what we have.

Shroom: ten years on

I find it hard to believe but it's exactly ten years since my book Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom was published. Though the occasional sentence makes me wince, and I blush at the florid dedication to now ex-partner, I remain immensely proud of it. It picked up some great reviews, not least from the New York Times.

UK paperback version of Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom by Andy Letcher

Like any book, it has its weaknesses. I was wrong about John Allegro, author of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, who argued that Christianity originated in a fly-agaric cult. Taking my lead from a letter by Robert Graves I assumed he was, as Graves put it, "nuts". He wasn't, and he genuinely hoped his theory would achieve academic recognition. While that doesn't affect my conclusion that his theory is wildly implausible, I'm sorry I questioned his sanity.

And my coverage of magic mushrooms in America during the 60s and 70s was too thin. Limited funds meant I didn't have the resources to travel to meet the movers and shakers from that time, and the social networking revolution, which would've meant I didn't have to, only really took off after the book was published. I hope that some later scholar will do them and the period justice.

I'm sure there are others.

I always hoped that the book would have a long shelf-life, and it seems that interest in the book is gaining momentum once again. I would imagine that's to do with a new generation of psychedelic millennials seeking to know more about the history of their interests and enthusiasms. I still get fan mail…

Fan mail for Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom by Andy Letcher

…though if you read some of the reviews on Amazon, you'd think I'm the devil incarnate. If one reviewer is to be believed, I saved someone them undergoing unnecessary gender-reassignment surgery (which I think is meant as some kind of satire, though the point of it is lost on me), and most incredibly of all I have been cast – let's be polite and say by certain 'conspiracy theorists' – as virulently anti-psychedelic. This came as quite a shock!

Conspiracy theorists attack Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom by Andy Letcher

I prefer to let people read between the lines rather than spelling everything out in red letters, but for the record my stance has always been pro the judicious use of psychedelics (and I would have thought that was obvious to anyone who's actually read the book). However, I've never understood why being pro-psychedelics requires the abrogation of reason, and if psychedelia truly wants to come in from the cold, as I believe it must, then it has to subject itself to some critical self-examination.

The desire to see the world as it is and not how we would wish it to be lies as much behind the psychedelic quest as it does the academic project. My hope was that by placing the history of the magic mushroom on firmer foundations, it would grant the subject more, not less, credibility, at least in the eyes of those with the actual power to change things. The fact that psychedelic studies seems to be returning inexorably to the academy suggests there are many others who agree.

So, yes, Shroom is an academic book masquerading as a popular read but it's certainly not a work of scientism, attempting to pour scorn on the wilder imaginings of the psilocybin flash. After all, it's the refusal of the trip ever to accept closure of meaning that makes it so damned interesting.

US paperback version of Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom

Fans of the book may like to know that I am writing again on the subject of magic mushrooms, as I always intended to do, only this time in a more writerly and autobiographical way, and without recourse to the footnote. Shroom took two years to research and write, working full time. Now that I can only snatch an hour or so here and there, this next book may take a little longer, so watch this space.

But in the meantime, I'd like to thank all those of you that bought the book and the many who've written to me to say how much they enjoyed it.

And if you haven't read it yet, why not treat yourself to a copy?

The Green Scythe Fair

Rumours that the Green Scythe Fair has lost its edge have been greatly exaggerated. You'll be hard pressed to find a more bucolic and delightful English Country Fair. 

Competitor at the Green Scythe Fair, Muchelney, Somerset 2016

Held near Muchelney on the Somerset levels, this is a day for lovers of the billhook and mattock, the hand-drill and the bow-saw, the hurdle and the pitch-fork. There are so many wood-turners, beekeepers, thatchers, bodgers and small-holders, it's as if the pages of John Seymour's Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency have exploded mysteriously into life. 

This is a celebration of the rule of thumb, the fat of the land, the acre over the hectare; of a life lived deosil, by the turning of the sun. Only the drunken auctioning-off of a wife could make it more Hardy-esque.

Selection of billhooks for sale at the Green Scythe Fair

Ruddy farmers raise pints of cloudy scrumpy to banging bluegrass then sleep off their hangovers under a hay-rick. Children run riot in stooks that have been freshly mown from the meadow (scythed, of course). 

There's country-dancing, and tipsy fiddlers leading improvised sessions.

And this being England, there are torrential showers that send everyone sprinting for the nearest shelter. The opportunistic take the chance to grab a sneaky organic wild-boar burger.

Sheltering from the rain at the Green Scythe Fair, Muchelney, Somerset 2016

This is a country fair with a twist though, for it lies just outside the Glastonbury Zodiac and so draws in the hippies and the crusties and the travellers who live within its green folds. They come in their converted transit vans, and even a barrel-topped vardo, to smoke surreptitious spliffs and get bongled on cider. So, a chance to catch up with old friends then. 

But whoever comes and whatever their reason for doing so, the scythe remains centre-stage. 

The festival rings around a lush meadow where scything competitions are held throughout the day. Scythers take on electric strimmers, compete with each other against the clock, or for precision of cut, or to see who can toss the most hay over a high wall. No joke, this isn't some elaborate variant on welly-boot throwing or blat-the-rat. Ripped men with calloused hands, tanned backs and Tolstoy's beard travel from all over Europe to compete. Women too, though not so many. 

They all come to talk blades and whetstones, to compare the traditional English scythe with its leaner continental cousin, to plot long-overdue land reform and to share notes on how to get the self-build past the planners. 

Car-parking for scythers at the Green Scythe Fair, Muchelney, Somerset 2016

In doing so, they are returning the word 'radical' to its original meaning: 'of the roots'. For all its olde worlde charm, this is a radical festival. With every measured sweep of the blade this new peasantry is cutting at the bloated excesses of modern agribusiness. They seek to return us to the soil. 

Remember the land, they say. Remember where your food comes from. Remember the hands that toiled for you.

Theirs is a pitchfork revolution and one day, I hope, it will prove unstoppable.

Scyther at the Green Scythe festival, Muchelney, Somerset 2016