Sunday 20th May
Glastonbury
The air temperature fluctuates dramatically throughout the night, as does its moisture content. Winds come and go and come back again, and my nervous system’s night watchman is very twitchy. What did I expect, sleeping on top of a windswept hill?
I wake to the sound of footsteps – Glastonbury’s human dawn chorus is already beginning to arrive in order to greet Avalon’s rising sun.
I feel extra cranky this morning. My nose feels sunburned, my body aches, and I’m already beginning to smell. I put a few drops of lavender on my palms, rub some on my nose, and then give my armpits and crotch a hobo wash. To my slight shame, I find myself worrying that someone will mistake me for an actual homeless person. I’m not one of those lost and lonely homeless people, you know. I’m actually a pilgrim with a purpose. A prejudiced pillock, more like. Where does this stuff come from, and what can you do with it when you begin to see it rising from your murky depths? Shove it back down? Pretend you never saw it? Get rid of it? Welcome it? Love it?
Still snug in my lavender-scented sleeping bag, I do a caterpillar shuffle around to the eastern side of the tower, and settle in for the show. A light cover of mist lies over the vale of Avalon, overlaying a dreamy patchwork quilt of fields and orchards and copses, all sewn together with hedgerow seams. The horizon begins to ooze an anticipatory oily orange, and then the sun he appears, at first a tiny but fiercely bright point of flame, soon blooming into a blinding ball of light, and then rapidly rising. Some of the sun worshippers sit in meditative poses, whilst agile yogis and yoginis do their sun salutation thing.
The two other guys who slept up here last night are packing up their bedding. I realise that, for all my desires to be a good and loving person, I actually feel quite ambivalent about them – a mix of compassion and judgment, with a bit of pity thrown in, which is not a great mix at all. I don’t like to admit this – especially because I spent quite a few years working with homeless people – but there’s a subconscious part of me that judges homeless people for being moral and social failures. Deeper still, I think I judge their – and therefore my own – vulnerability. Fuck – sometimes I can be wonderfully accepting, but sometimes I’m a properly tight, judgmental git. How the outer world so often holds up a mirror to our fractured inner worlds, huh?
I get out my journal, and find myself writing down the obvious question.
Why am I doing this pilgrimage?
The story I’ve told my friends is that I’m going on a “hitch-hiking pilgrimage around sacred places and public houses of Britain” and am going to write a book about my adventures. But, really, that sounds like my PR Department talking. I’m pretty sure that my closer friends – who have witnessed my last few self-disintegrating years up close – have seen through my upbeat press releases.
The true story is less lyrical and entertaining.
Right now, despite being able to put on a brave and functional face, I feel really lost. The last few years have brought me to my knees. My nervous system is all over the place – I’m dealing with some sort of PTSD. Most of the time my heart feels painfully shut down. And I miss my soul – whatever the soul is. I’m tired of feeling so self-contracted and so separate, and dealing with old trauma, and waking up “not keen on living either.”
And – oh – how I yearn for direct connection to Life’s Mystery – the connection that the mystics sing about.
I was recently reading a poem by Mary Oliver – Landscape – and came across the following lines:
“Every morning I walk around the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart ever close, I am as good as dead.”
I put the book down, and felt like I’d been punched. Several strong reactions simultaneously beat within my chest, among them an intense pang of envy, which must be one of the more unpleasant human feelings. And I wanted to say to her, You wouldn’t actually die! And then I remembered how bad it can get sometimes. But there will be a thick pane of glass between you and the pond, between you and the breeze, between you and Life itself. And you won’t write much poetry. And you’ll forget what joy feels like. And...
And then I re-read her lines and realised that is precisely what she is referring to. And I had to admit: living with PTSD and a closed heart and an exiled soul can sometimes feel like living in some sort of distressed and dissociated zombie zone. I know this isn’t the real me, but it’s doing a fucking convincing job.
Ah, I’m really hoping this pilgrimage helps me reconnect to all of this vital stuff. Heart. Soul. Life. Mystery. Not to mention a sense of purpose.
I recoil a bit admitting all of this. As if it’s shameful to have wants and needs such as these. As if it’s shameful to feel so disconnected so much of the time. As if it’s shameful to feel broken. To be broken. As if it’s shameful to be a hungry and thirsty seeker.
Ah, where do I begin?
Five years ago I moved back up to Lincolnshire – and into my old boyhood bedroom – to look after my mum, who’d recently been diagnosed with cancer. It was both a very beautiful and a very terrible time – awful and awesome in equal measure – and I accompanied and supported and loved her the very best I could. Oh my, how our roles changed as the disease spread, and how in love we became. But my love wasn’t enough to save her. And the last couple of weeks were just plain hellish. It was like being in a slow-motion nightmare – watching my beautiful mother literally shrivel before my eyes, hang on for days on end, and then finally die.
For several weeks after she died, though, my heart was wide open, probably too wide. I remember being on the phone to a good friend – who has experienced severe bipolar disorder – and I was chattering away about spiritual insight this and the nature of death that, and he quietly responded, “You sound quite high.”
And that stopped me in my tracks. And I saw the truth in what he was saying: I had entered the foothills of mania. And then I instantly felt my heart shut down. It took all of a minute – and it felt like there was a particular, orderly lockdown process that it needed to follow. And suddenly I was back on planet Earth. Sober. And love and light – and mania – were no longer flowing through me.
Subsequently I fell into quite a bad depression, but I didn’t realise I was depressed – I just thought I was crap at grieving, and crap at life in general. It didn’t help that I stayed in the old family home whilst my brother and I put it on the market. It took eighteen months to sell. I think I had this sort of Zen-Christian-lone-male-monastic-super-hero fantasy that I’d plough through grief and loneliness and emerge an impressive self-sufficient spiritual warrior, at peace with death, and at peace with himself, and at peace with the world.
Fucking hell. Where do I get these grandiose ideas from?
And then, from beneath the depression, emerged levels of anxiety that knocked me off my feet, sometimes literally. At times it felt like madness. It took me another year to realise that this was unresolved trauma. Specifically – as far as I am aware – the trauma of being sent to boarding school.
But realising that you’re suffering from unresolved trauma doesn’t mean you’re healed. It was only the beginning of a deeper descent. Sure, there have been sunnier days and funnier days in the last few years – and for a couple of years a good woman gave me the best love she could muster – but I’ve spent hundreds of mornings waking up with unknown, anxious dread in my belly and bones, wishing to return to the temporary oblivion of sleep, at war with the person I seem to have become.
The more I learn about trauma and unresolved trauma, the more I see that I am not alone in these experiences – but I didn’t know this at first. And whilst intellectually I know that a lot of my symptoms and experiences are not personal – there are patterned responses to trauma – of course, I still take things way too personally.
Chronic self-isolation – surprise, surprise – hasn’t helped my descent. I spend most of my time by myself, at my cabin on the south coast, wishing for all my inner mayhem to end, whilst trying to present a vaguely functional front to the world. I’m only just beginning to realise that I really don’t know how to ask for help. There’s an old survival story inside me that believes that asking for help is the most shameful thing a boy or man can do.
I am so hungry for peace.
And I really want to put these last few years behind me.
And hitting the road armed only with a tent and a thumb is one of the things I’ve always done when I don’t really know what’s going on, or what to do.
Does all this sound a bit weird?
Did you know that you were travelling with such a loon?
Having said that, good chances are that you’re a bit of a loon, too. Or know a loon or two. Or maybe you’ve been known to sing a loony tune.
I suspect a lot of us pilgrims are a bit lost a bit lonely and a little bit loony to boot. And it’s probably not just a modern phenomenon.
Have you ever felt like you want a holiday from being you? That this isn’t the real you? That real life is happening elsewhere?
Maybe I’m packing far too many hopes and expectations and quiet desperations into this pilgrim bag of mine? Fuck it. This is how it is. I am desperate. If this pilgrimage doesn’t shift things, I’m fucked.
I finish my journal entry and stow it in a side pocket. Happily panting dogs are beginning to arrive at the top of the Tor, slobbering with canine joy, sniffing around for gossip and news, their huffing and puffing owners not too far behind them. Early mornings are far busier up here than I imagined they’d be.
Hmmm. Sunday, traditionally, isn’t the best day for hitching, so I’ll reckon I’m going to stay in Glastonbury at least until tomorrow. Maybe Sundays will become my regular day of rest? I don’t know.
I descend the Tor and turn up Well House Lane to visit the White Spring.
It’s remarkable that Glastonbury has a Red Spring and a White Spring right next to each other. I’m sure we humans have been making up myths about them ever since we first drank from their waters. Consisting of a slightly dilapidated, but colourfully decorated, old municipal building and a slightly bedraggled New Age rockery and shrine, the White Spring is a bit of a weird space, slightly off kilter. A couple of homeless-looking men are sitting chewing the fat around a charred circle where a fire has recently burned. Fresh spring water issues from a length of copper pipe, and a woman is filling up five large water containers in the back of her car, using a bit of hosepipe she’s brought for the job. Whilst one of the large containers is filling up, she takes a smaller container over to the road to a much smaller pipe, issuing its own flow of water – the Red Spring.
“You should taste the difference between the two,” she suggests, and I do, first the white and then the red. The white is crystal clear, slips down easily, but the red, the red tastes of... blood. Of iron. Yes, it distinctly tastes of iron. A spongy sort of iron, that seems to stick to the roof of my mouth.
A man who’s also filling water bottles enquires after my mission, and then makes a couple of suggestions: Carn Les Boel in Cornwall – “where the Michael and Mary lines cross” – and Lamorna Cove, near the Merry Maidens. I have this comic glimpse of being on the road in perpetuity, fuelled by daily, exponential recommendations.
I fill up my water bottles with White Spring water and head into town, as the Chalice Well Gardens aren’t yet open. But the Hundredth Monkey on the High Street is, so I order a coffee and a full vegan breakfast, plug in my keyboard and begin typing up yesterday, and what’s happened thus far today. I’m not sure how much of my journal is going to be done by pen and how much by keyboard. We’ll see – but I’m definitely going to have to spend an hour or two a day on the writing.
I wake to the sound of footsteps – Glastonbury’s human dawn chorus is already beginning to arrive in order to greet Avalon’s rising sun.
I feel extra cranky this morning. My nose feels sunburned, my body aches, and I’m already beginning to smell. I put a few drops of lavender on my palms, rub some on my nose, and then give my armpits and crotch a hobo wash. To my slight shame, I find myself worrying that someone will mistake me for an actual homeless person. I’m not one of those lost and lonely homeless people, you know. I’m actually a pilgrim with a purpose. A prejudiced pillock, more like. Where does this stuff come from, and what can you do with it when you begin to see it rising from your murky depths? Shove it back down? Pretend you never saw it? Get rid of it? Welcome it? Love it?
Still snug in my lavender-scented sleeping bag, I do a caterpillar shuffle around to the eastern side of the tower, and settle in for the show. A light cover of mist lies over the vale of Avalon, overlaying a dreamy patchwork quilt of fields and orchards and copses, all sewn together with hedgerow seams. The horizon begins to ooze an anticipatory oily orange, and then the sun he appears, at first a tiny but fiercely bright point of flame, soon blooming into a blinding ball of light, and then rapidly rising. Some of the sun worshippers sit in meditative poses, whilst agile yogis and yoginis do their sun salutation thing.
The two other guys who slept up here last night are packing up their bedding. I realise that, for all my desires to be a good and loving person, I actually feel quite ambivalent about them – a mix of compassion and judgment, with a bit of pity thrown in, which is not a great mix at all. I don’t like to admit this – especially because I spent quite a few years working with homeless people – but there’s a subconscious part of me that judges homeless people for being moral and social failures. Deeper still, I think I judge their – and therefore my own – vulnerability. Fuck – sometimes I can be wonderfully accepting, but sometimes I’m a properly tight, judgmental git. How the outer world so often holds up a mirror to our fractured inner worlds, huh?
I get out my journal, and find myself writing down the obvious question.
Why am I doing this pilgrimage?
The story I’ve told my friends is that I’m going on a “hitch-hiking pilgrimage around sacred places and public houses of Britain” and am going to write a book about my adventures. But, really, that sounds like my PR Department talking. I’m pretty sure that my closer friends – who have witnessed my last few self-disintegrating years up close – have seen through my upbeat press releases.
The true story is less lyrical and entertaining.
Right now, despite being able to put on a brave and functional face, I feel really lost. The last few years have brought me to my knees. My nervous system is all over the place – I’m dealing with some sort of PTSD. Most of the time my heart feels painfully shut down. And I miss my soul – whatever the soul is. I’m tired of feeling so self-contracted and so separate, and dealing with old trauma, and waking up “not keen on living either.”
And – oh – how I yearn for direct connection to Life’s Mystery – the connection that the mystics sing about.
I was recently reading a poem by Mary Oliver – Landscape – and came across the following lines:
“Every morning I walk around the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart ever close, I am as good as dead.”
I put the book down, and felt like I’d been punched. Several strong reactions simultaneously beat within my chest, among them an intense pang of envy, which must be one of the more unpleasant human feelings. And I wanted to say to her, You wouldn’t actually die! And then I remembered how bad it can get sometimes. But there will be a thick pane of glass between you and the pond, between you and the breeze, between you and Life itself. And you won’t write much poetry. And you’ll forget what joy feels like. And...
And then I re-read her lines and realised that is precisely what she is referring to. And I had to admit: living with PTSD and a closed heart and an exiled soul can sometimes feel like living in some sort of distressed and dissociated zombie zone. I know this isn’t the real me, but it’s doing a fucking convincing job.
Ah, I’m really hoping this pilgrimage helps me reconnect to all of this vital stuff. Heart. Soul. Life. Mystery. Not to mention a sense of purpose.
I recoil a bit admitting all of this. As if it’s shameful to have wants and needs such as these. As if it’s shameful to feel so disconnected so much of the time. As if it’s shameful to feel broken. To be broken. As if it’s shameful to be a hungry and thirsty seeker.
Ah, where do I begin?
Five years ago I moved back up to Lincolnshire – and into my old boyhood bedroom – to look after my mum, who’d recently been diagnosed with cancer. It was both a very beautiful and a very terrible time – awful and awesome in equal measure – and I accompanied and supported and loved her the very best I could. Oh my, how our roles changed as the disease spread, and how in love we became. But my love wasn’t enough to save her. And the last couple of weeks were just plain hellish. It was like being in a slow-motion nightmare – watching my beautiful mother literally shrivel before my eyes, hang on for days on end, and then finally die.
For several weeks after she died, though, my heart was wide open, probably too wide. I remember being on the phone to a good friend – who has experienced severe bipolar disorder – and I was chattering away about spiritual insight this and the nature of death that, and he quietly responded, “You sound quite high.”
And that stopped me in my tracks. And I saw the truth in what he was saying: I had entered the foothills of mania. And then I instantly felt my heart shut down. It took all of a minute – and it felt like there was a particular, orderly lockdown process that it needed to follow. And suddenly I was back on planet Earth. Sober. And love and light – and mania – were no longer flowing through me.
Subsequently I fell into quite a bad depression, but I didn’t realise I was depressed – I just thought I was crap at grieving, and crap at life in general. It didn’t help that I stayed in the old family home whilst my brother and I put it on the market. It took eighteen months to sell. I think I had this sort of Zen-Christian-lone-male-monastic-super-hero fantasy that I’d plough through grief and loneliness and emerge an impressive self-sufficient spiritual warrior, at peace with death, and at peace with himself, and at peace with the world.
Fucking hell. Where do I get these grandiose ideas from?
And then, from beneath the depression, emerged levels of anxiety that knocked me off my feet, sometimes literally. At times it felt like madness. It took me another year to realise that this was unresolved trauma. Specifically – as far as I am aware – the trauma of being sent to boarding school.
But realising that you’re suffering from unresolved trauma doesn’t mean you’re healed. It was only the beginning of a deeper descent. Sure, there have been sunnier days and funnier days in the last few years – and for a couple of years a good woman gave me the best love she could muster – but I’ve spent hundreds of mornings waking up with unknown, anxious dread in my belly and bones, wishing to return to the temporary oblivion of sleep, at war with the person I seem to have become.
The more I learn about trauma and unresolved trauma, the more I see that I am not alone in these experiences – but I didn’t know this at first. And whilst intellectually I know that a lot of my symptoms and experiences are not personal – there are patterned responses to trauma – of course, I still take things way too personally.
Chronic self-isolation – surprise, surprise – hasn’t helped my descent. I spend most of my time by myself, at my cabin on the south coast, wishing for all my inner mayhem to end, whilst trying to present a vaguely functional front to the world. I’m only just beginning to realise that I really don’t know how to ask for help. There’s an old survival story inside me that believes that asking for help is the most shameful thing a boy or man can do.
I am so hungry for peace.
And I really want to put these last few years behind me.
And hitting the road armed only with a tent and a thumb is one of the things I’ve always done when I don’t really know what’s going on, or what to do.
Does all this sound a bit weird?
Did you know that you were travelling with such a loon?
Having said that, good chances are that you’re a bit of a loon, too. Or know a loon or two. Or maybe you’ve been known to sing a loony tune.
I suspect a lot of us pilgrims are a bit lost a bit lonely and a little bit loony to boot. And it’s probably not just a modern phenomenon.
Have you ever felt like you want a holiday from being you? That this isn’t the real you? That real life is happening elsewhere?
Maybe I’m packing far too many hopes and expectations and quiet desperations into this pilgrim bag of mine? Fuck it. This is how it is. I am desperate. If this pilgrimage doesn’t shift things, I’m fucked.
I finish my journal entry and stow it in a side pocket. Happily panting dogs are beginning to arrive at the top of the Tor, slobbering with canine joy, sniffing around for gossip and news, their huffing and puffing owners not too far behind them. Early mornings are far busier up here than I imagined they’d be.
Hmmm. Sunday, traditionally, isn’t the best day for hitching, so I’ll reckon I’m going to stay in Glastonbury at least until tomorrow. Maybe Sundays will become my regular day of rest? I don’t know.
I descend the Tor and turn up Well House Lane to visit the White Spring.
It’s remarkable that Glastonbury has a Red Spring and a White Spring right next to each other. I’m sure we humans have been making up myths about them ever since we first drank from their waters. Consisting of a slightly dilapidated, but colourfully decorated, old municipal building and a slightly bedraggled New Age rockery and shrine, the White Spring is a bit of a weird space, slightly off kilter. A couple of homeless-looking men are sitting chewing the fat around a charred circle where a fire has recently burned. Fresh spring water issues from a length of copper pipe, and a woman is filling up five large water containers in the back of her car, using a bit of hosepipe she’s brought for the job. Whilst one of the large containers is filling up, she takes a smaller container over to the road to a much smaller pipe, issuing its own flow of water – the Red Spring.
“You should taste the difference between the two,” she suggests, and I do, first the white and then the red. The white is crystal clear, slips down easily, but the red, the red tastes of... blood. Of iron. Yes, it distinctly tastes of iron. A spongy sort of iron, that seems to stick to the roof of my mouth.
A man who’s also filling water bottles enquires after my mission, and then makes a couple of suggestions: Carn Les Boel in Cornwall – “where the Michael and Mary lines cross” – and Lamorna Cove, near the Merry Maidens. I have this comic glimpse of being on the road in perpetuity, fuelled by daily, exponential recommendations.
I fill up my water bottles with White Spring water and head into town, as the Chalice Well Gardens aren’t yet open. But the Hundredth Monkey on the High Street is, so I order a coffee and a full vegan breakfast, plug in my keyboard and begin typing up yesterday, and what’s happened thus far today. I’m not sure how much of my journal is going to be done by pen and how much by keyboard. We’ll see – but I’m definitely going to have to spend an hour or two a day on the writing.
The Chalice Well Gardens – dedicated to the waters of the Red Spring – are exquisite: cool, sunny, peaceful, restorative, imaginatively designed, and full of lovingly tended beauty.
I guess you could start at the top of the Gardens, at the Well itself, and follow the water down, but I start at the bottom and take a couple of dawdling hours to make the full ascent: from the rusty red waters of the Vesica Pool; up between two sentinel yews, the bark of their lower trunks finely clothed with fresh green needles; to King Arthur’s Court and the Healing Pool, where I bathe my feet until all the blood in my body is deliciously cool; to the Lion’s Head, through which the waters flow, and from which I take a few rusty sips; through a joyful May garden, pausing upon a shaded Angel Seat; and then up to the Well Head itself, where a group of New Age pilgrims are singing in a circle, one of their leaders strumming and flirting upon the strings of his guitar.
I wait until they have gone, and then sit within the sanctuary of the well.
Breathing in, I calm my body
Breathing out, I smile
Dwelling in the present moment
I know this is a wonderful moment
Silently, I repeat the prayer several times, slowing down, taking in the reality that the words convey, coupling each phrase to the rising and falling of my breath.
This well feels like a proper place of pilgrimage. The wrought iron cover features two interlocking circles – the Vesica Piscis – with a lance running through them both. I find it quite a sexy design.
In the meadows next to the Well Head people are snoozing and chatting and sunbathing, and the whole place is full of colourful, spiritually focussed, energetically sensitive, and often quite voluptuous women. This, I feel is their meadow and their turf. I’m not complaining. You don’t come across many matriarchal spaces like this. I can see why Glastonbury is renowned for its honouring of the divine feminine.
At three o’clock a bell rings out, and the gardens suddenly hush. For a minute the gardens fall silent of human voice.
A nearby notice provides some background to “The Silent Minute”, introduced by Wellesley Tudor Pole – founder of the Chalice Well Trust – back in 1940, “to unite Britons in a prayer of peace, and to create a channel between the visible and invisible worlds through which Divine help and inspiration could be received.” During the war, it was observed across the country at nine o’clock each evening, following on from the nine bongs of Big Ben.
“We feel that a prayer for peace is just as relevant today,” says the notice, “and we invite you to join with us in silently focusing and sending forth Divine Love and Wisdom to lead us in the ways of peace, the building of a better world, and enabling us to do our part in humility and selflessness.”
Shortly after this silent minute, from over the garden wall, and from the direction of the other spring, a didgeridoo of sorts begins to thrum and growl, accompanied by a guitar and random howls of laughter. The horns of the ragtaggle White Spring army begin shaking the New Age walls of the Red Spring citadel.
After closing time at the Well, I wander down the road to the Rifleman, but it’s seven eighths empty, and looks more of a Saturday night pub than a late Sunday afternoon one. The King Arthur it is, then. Along the High Street a man who was begging recognises me from earlier on at the White Spring, and we get chatting. Joe tells me where he’s currently camping – in a field on the other side of the Tor – and, with his fingers tracing an invisible map upon the pavement, gives me instructions on how to get there, saying I’m welcome to share the field with him. I thank him and offer him some water. “No thanks, mate, I’m on the beer,” he replies, in a refreshingly matter of fact way.
The King Arthur is just the pub I’m after. I take my pint out into a sunny pub garden, which is full of local freaks and friendly huddles – debriefing about weekend battles, sharing gossip and jokes and guffaws. There’s even a table of five women all clad, neck to toe, in red. I get talking to the chef from the Hundredth Monkey, a gentle-spirited man from Tamil Nadu, and once he’s left for home I recognise one of my fellow Tor sleepers, and we get chatting too. If you’re a traveller in need of a chat, pubs are the places to go. He too is a gentle-spirited man, a long way from his Glasgow home. I ask him about being a rough-sleeper in Glastonbury.
“Compared to Glasgow, man, this is Arcadia,” he says. “I wake up in the morning, look out across the land, and I’m in the middle of my very own piece of English paradise. And even though I’ve been up that Tor dozens and dozens of times, it’s still got so much more to show me.”
He earns his money busking with a sax and harmonica, with a bit of singing thrown in, and plays in a couple of makeshift bands. He has such an upbeat attitude that I find myself quietly ashamed of the half-arsed judgments I made about him earlier on, and the projections I threw at him. Judge first, ask questions later, that’s my tendency. Not the most appealing of inter-personal habits. Hmmm, I can feel the journey setting me some homework already.
When I tell him about my plans for the summer, and that I’m going to include Scotland in my travels, his eyes light up. “You’ve got to go to the Cobbler, man. And go through the eye of the needle. It’s unbelievable. No joke: you could lose your life. Seriously. Drop a coin and it takes ten seconds, maybe fifteen, before it hits the bottom.”
He begins to give me detailed instructions about a particular cliff face and this circular ledge you have to climb down onto, and I’m writing it all down in my notebook, when it suddenly hits me that what he’s describing is my idea of self-shitting vertigo hell. I say so much.
“Maybe it’s a Glasgow thing,” he replies. “You see that path,” he says, pointing at the pub garden’s narrow concrete path. “In Glasgow, if that was a ravine, with a thousand foot drop, we’d be daring one another to jump over it. It’s not a big jump, but if you make a mistake, you’re absolutely fucked.”
I like the Glaswegian spirit and banter. Come the final battle at the End of Time, you definitely want to be in the same army as that lot – providing the final battle isn’t actually between the Protestants and the Catholics.
On my way back to the Tor I swing by the Co-op and buy some bananas and three-beers-for-a-fiver, for me and Joe, and follow the back roads around the Tor until I’m sure I’m in the paddock that he described to me. No sign of Joe though, so I put my tent up – in the western shade of some trees, so as not to get woken up too early – and have a bedtime beer and banana, before calling it a day and crawling into the safety of my very own mobile home.
I guess you could start at the top of the Gardens, at the Well itself, and follow the water down, but I start at the bottom and take a couple of dawdling hours to make the full ascent: from the rusty red waters of the Vesica Pool; up between two sentinel yews, the bark of their lower trunks finely clothed with fresh green needles; to King Arthur’s Court and the Healing Pool, where I bathe my feet until all the blood in my body is deliciously cool; to the Lion’s Head, through which the waters flow, and from which I take a few rusty sips; through a joyful May garden, pausing upon a shaded Angel Seat; and then up to the Well Head itself, where a group of New Age pilgrims are singing in a circle, one of their leaders strumming and flirting upon the strings of his guitar.
I wait until they have gone, and then sit within the sanctuary of the well.
Breathing in, I calm my body
Breathing out, I smile
Dwelling in the present moment
I know this is a wonderful moment
Silently, I repeat the prayer several times, slowing down, taking in the reality that the words convey, coupling each phrase to the rising and falling of my breath.
This well feels like a proper place of pilgrimage. The wrought iron cover features two interlocking circles – the Vesica Piscis – with a lance running through them both. I find it quite a sexy design.
In the meadows next to the Well Head people are snoozing and chatting and sunbathing, and the whole place is full of colourful, spiritually focussed, energetically sensitive, and often quite voluptuous women. This, I feel is their meadow and their turf. I’m not complaining. You don’t come across many matriarchal spaces like this. I can see why Glastonbury is renowned for its honouring of the divine feminine.
At three o’clock a bell rings out, and the gardens suddenly hush. For a minute the gardens fall silent of human voice.
A nearby notice provides some background to “The Silent Minute”, introduced by Wellesley Tudor Pole – founder of the Chalice Well Trust – back in 1940, “to unite Britons in a prayer of peace, and to create a channel between the visible and invisible worlds through which Divine help and inspiration could be received.” During the war, it was observed across the country at nine o’clock each evening, following on from the nine bongs of Big Ben.
“We feel that a prayer for peace is just as relevant today,” says the notice, “and we invite you to join with us in silently focusing and sending forth Divine Love and Wisdom to lead us in the ways of peace, the building of a better world, and enabling us to do our part in humility and selflessness.”
Shortly after this silent minute, from over the garden wall, and from the direction of the other spring, a didgeridoo of sorts begins to thrum and growl, accompanied by a guitar and random howls of laughter. The horns of the ragtaggle White Spring army begin shaking the New Age walls of the Red Spring citadel.
After closing time at the Well, I wander down the road to the Rifleman, but it’s seven eighths empty, and looks more of a Saturday night pub than a late Sunday afternoon one. The King Arthur it is, then. Along the High Street a man who was begging recognises me from earlier on at the White Spring, and we get chatting. Joe tells me where he’s currently camping – in a field on the other side of the Tor – and, with his fingers tracing an invisible map upon the pavement, gives me instructions on how to get there, saying I’m welcome to share the field with him. I thank him and offer him some water. “No thanks, mate, I’m on the beer,” he replies, in a refreshingly matter of fact way.
The King Arthur is just the pub I’m after. I take my pint out into a sunny pub garden, which is full of local freaks and friendly huddles – debriefing about weekend battles, sharing gossip and jokes and guffaws. There’s even a table of five women all clad, neck to toe, in red. I get talking to the chef from the Hundredth Monkey, a gentle-spirited man from Tamil Nadu, and once he’s left for home I recognise one of my fellow Tor sleepers, and we get chatting too. If you’re a traveller in need of a chat, pubs are the places to go. He too is a gentle-spirited man, a long way from his Glasgow home. I ask him about being a rough-sleeper in Glastonbury.
“Compared to Glasgow, man, this is Arcadia,” he says. “I wake up in the morning, look out across the land, and I’m in the middle of my very own piece of English paradise. And even though I’ve been up that Tor dozens and dozens of times, it’s still got so much more to show me.”
He earns his money busking with a sax and harmonica, with a bit of singing thrown in, and plays in a couple of makeshift bands. He has such an upbeat attitude that I find myself quietly ashamed of the half-arsed judgments I made about him earlier on, and the projections I threw at him. Judge first, ask questions later, that’s my tendency. Not the most appealing of inter-personal habits. Hmmm, I can feel the journey setting me some homework already.
When I tell him about my plans for the summer, and that I’m going to include Scotland in my travels, his eyes light up. “You’ve got to go to the Cobbler, man. And go through the eye of the needle. It’s unbelievable. No joke: you could lose your life. Seriously. Drop a coin and it takes ten seconds, maybe fifteen, before it hits the bottom.”
He begins to give me detailed instructions about a particular cliff face and this circular ledge you have to climb down onto, and I’m writing it all down in my notebook, when it suddenly hits me that what he’s describing is my idea of self-shitting vertigo hell. I say so much.
“Maybe it’s a Glasgow thing,” he replies. “You see that path,” he says, pointing at the pub garden’s narrow concrete path. “In Glasgow, if that was a ravine, with a thousand foot drop, we’d be daring one another to jump over it. It’s not a big jump, but if you make a mistake, you’re absolutely fucked.”
I like the Glaswegian spirit and banter. Come the final battle at the End of Time, you definitely want to be in the same army as that lot – providing the final battle isn’t actually between the Protestants and the Catholics.
On my way back to the Tor I swing by the Co-op and buy some bananas and three-beers-for-a-fiver, for me and Joe, and follow the back roads around the Tor until I’m sure I’m in the paddock that he described to me. No sign of Joe though, so I put my tent up – in the western shade of some trees, so as not to get woken up too early – and have a bedtime beer and banana, before calling it a day and crawling into the safety of my very own mobile home.