Monday 21st May
Glastonbury – Porlock
I slept well last night, but the morning sun has just found my tent and its bailiffs have served me with an imminent eviction notice. Reminds me of those times at festies when the mid-summer sun hits your tent, but you got schmangled the night before and you wake up fifteen minutes later in a sweaty, groggy, disorientated, rapidly over-heating muddle, and realise that you’ve got about twelve point six seconds to get outside and get some fresh air before your boiling body and bubbling brain actually explode.
I emerge to the sight of a blue tent in the paddock – presumably Joe’s – but no signs of life. I have a breakfast banana and then decide to purge my pack of obviously unnecessary things. I end up with a good kilo of superfluous stuff, which I bag up, ready to take to the post office.
I hide my packed bags in a hedge and go for a barefoot walk up the Tor, this time using the rear path. Ah, unburdened of my pack, I feel as nimble as a mountain goat on helium. And barefoot too – that puts lightweight delight in the spring of my step. I love being barefoot – it’s like opening an extra sense in your soles, or making love to the land without a condom. I practically skip and dance my way to the top. Even just three days in, I can feel a new fitness arising in my body.
And it’s great to take in these views in a good mood, because I was pretty ratty yesterday morning. Man, so often I let my undulating moods get in the way of the views that life has to offer, and – maybe more tragically – so often I let my moods get in the way of my fundamental relationship to Life too.
Glastonbury Tor, topped with derelict St Michael’s Tower, is quite a remarkable view and viewing point – and quite a beacon for the imagination too. It’s easy to feel like a king or queen up here, surveying your royal realms. Or you can imagine parallel, fey Arthurian worlds, where angels and archangels and dragons and saints weave their energies and powers and tales. It’s all up here, and more, and I’m even tempted to wager my sleeping bag that William Blake once sat on this very spot, pondering and wondering and dreaming away a fine and sunny morning such as this.
His famous poem floats into my mind:
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England’s pleasant pastures seen!
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green and pleasant Land.
I know I’m late to the mythic party, but only a couple of years ago did I realise that there’s an old and popular myth about Jesus visiting Britain, and that’s what Blake is referring to in the first verse – those ancient feet belong to a young Jesus, brought here by his uncle Joseph of Arimethea. I’d always pictured those feet belonging to some sort of bearded Father God figure – a bit like Blake’s famous Ancient of Days.
Trouble is, it’s nigh on impossible to recall Blake’s famous words without prompting Hubert Parry’s equally famous musical accompaniment from the jukebox of my brain. But what a corker of a combination. Jerusalem – as the hymn and poem are now both known – was our unofficial school anthem, and we used to belt it out on the last day of term as if our lives depended on it. I think part of the poem and hymn’s synthesised genius is that so many different sorts of people enjoy singing it, not just homesick public schoolboys: militant suffragists, urban socialists, rural worshippers, loyal royalists, radical republicans, proud patriots, rowdy rugby fans, and full-throated members of the W.I. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few anarchists and a few fascists have a soft spot for it too. Once the United Kingdom finally unravels into its constituent countries, I’d vote for it to be England’s official national anthem. Either Jerusalem of the Hokey Cokey.
When I get back to the paddock, Joe’s up and packing his tent away. He says he had a bit of a late night last night because there was a little party at the White Spring, and he drank too much cider, which he admits is his favourite tipple. I suspect that there are quite a few little late night parties at the White Spring.
I apologise that I haven’t got any cider, but mention I’ve got a couple of beers. He’s game. So we have one each, and share a hash spliff too – a noble enough hobo breakfast. And Joe tells me some of his story – of bankruptcy and the slide into homelessness. Says he’s slept out in every single town in the south-west. And he actually seems fairly content with the rhythms and rhymes of homeless life – winter, spring, summer and all.
We wander the back road together, and Joe tells me about Richard Whyting, the last Abbot of Glastonbury. “Henry’s men set the church on fire, and hung old Whyting at the same time. They say that from miles around you could see his body dangling, silhouetted against the flames. And every now and then someone in town claims to have seen his ghost, still silhouetted against the flames, and still dangling.”
It sounds like a fable, the way Joe tells it. I look up at the Tor and try to imagine the reality.
“Not only was he hung,” continues Joe, “but his body was then quartered. And one of his limbs stayed in Glastonbury, and the other three went to Bath... and Bridgwater, I think. Can’t remember the fourth. And then, then they hung his head from one of the Abbey gates. Well, they probably skewered it on a spike. They sure didn’t do things by halves back then, did they?”
Even with such gory details, I still can’t quite imagine it. I’m glad my brain files it away as a fable.
We call by the White Spring so that I can fill up with water, and there’s a young man there with a very red and scabby wound on his leg from a recent cycling wipe-out, so I give him the roll of bandage from my first aid kit. “Fortunately, I was drunk at the time, so didn’t feel a thing,” he smiles, with both an ironic twinkle in his eye and a genuine look of good fortune.
Joe and I then head to the High Street and to his preferred begging pitch. I hand him a tenner to start his day. “That hasn’t started my day, Stephen – it’s made it.” We both smile and shake hands. Joe says I’m welcome in his paddock any time, and then disappears off to the shops.
I feel really heartened by my contact with Joe. All these quiet little, unsung acts of welcome and friendliness and generosity – without them surely the world would stop spinning.
I decide to go and visit the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey.
Oh my, what a place – curiously glorious even in its ruined state. And what a place it must have been in its religious heyday: magnificent, pious, prestigious, powerful, abundant, bustling... I dawdle around the ruined buildings in awe, picturing it all back in the day, and even let myself drift off into a parallel world in which Henry hadn’t been the furious megalomaniac that he was, and all the old abbeys of England were still standing intact, and long lineages of nuns and monks were still available to us, offering wisdom and counsel and retreat...
I visit the Lady Chapel. There’s a display panel with an artist’s impression of the chapel in its full, painted glory. Much of the stone would have been painted bright colours – ochre, red, green, blue, white, with black outlines and gold leaf – and adorned with gilded metal ornaments too. It makes me wonder how many of Britain’s churches and abbeys and cathedrals were once similarly coloured. They would have looked so, so different to the honeyed-toned stone creatures that we are used to today.
Then I visit St Joseph’s Well and Crypt. Seems like the cult of Joseph of Arimathea was once upon a time a big part of Glastonbury’s draw, and in many ways still is. I’m sure all the local New Agers are very conversant with it. Not only – so it goes – did Joseph bring the young Jesus to Glastonbury, but he later returned – with the Holy Grail itself – and became the first bishop of the British Isles, founding Britain’s first ever church right here, on this spot. Just the possibility tickles me deep.
Joseph’s Well was a very popular pilgrimage destination for centuries, renowned for miracles and cures. I try to picture all of this – fable and fact and theology all indistinguishable – and feel into it, and feel into the footsteps of those medieval folk, and their beliefs and hopes and struggles. Imagine bringing a sick relative to Glastonbury, and seeing the Abbey for the first time, when all you’ve ever seen and known is your squat village church and the neighbouring hills. And imagine the fear and trembling as you carry your beloved relative down the stone steps to the well, praying with all the might you can muster for his or her healing, all the while fearing their death, and all the while worrying that your faith – or lack of it – might be the most vital component of the whole procedure. And then – unless there was a miracle cure – you’d have to lug your relative back up the steps and somehow make it all the way back home, constantly monitoring their health, desperately looking for signs of improvement, wondering what report to give to the your anxious family members...
Unfortunately, the well is now covered with a big sheet of Perspex. I’m sure they have their reasons, but it feels really sad and bedraggled and disempowered to be thus attired. I get this sort of wistful feeling that we’ve left something behind, and possibly lost it for ever, but haven’t yet found anything to replace it with, and that – on some subterranean collective soulful level – the loss and hunger still haunt us.
In a smug fit of I’m-a-pilgrim-not-a-tourist I almost skip the visitors’ centre, but I’m really glad I don’t. Especially because there’s a fabulous model of the Abbey and it surroundings as they might have looked on the eve of their destruction. I take my donkey hat off to the person or persons who created this. The restored Abbey looks as grand as a cathedral.
On display is also a beautiful statue of the Madonna and Child, with a young toddler Jesus standing in the lap of his mother, his feet held in the taut folds of her dress, his small hands both open and aloft and cradled in hers, as if both of them are both playing together and offering joint blessings to anyone who stands before them. Turns out it’s carved by Eric Gill, and once was lost for forty years – but knowing about Gill’s history of sexual abuse always sours my appreciation of his remarkable art. Not to mention his typefaces.
A painted panel lists the Abbots of Glastonbury, from Worgret in 601 to Whyting in 1525. The pre-Norman names make my brain go dizzy with some sort of pre-Norman magical yearning:
Worgret, Lademund, Bregoret, Beorwald,
Aldbeorth, Atfrith, Guba
Kemgisel, Tica, Cuma, Walthern,
Tumberht, Beadulf, Muca,
Guthlac, Ealmund, Herefyrth, Striwerd,
Ealthun, Aelfric, Dunstan...
I go wandering around the massive Abbey grounds, taking in the site of King Arthur’s tomb, and find myself strolling through the most beautiful orchard I’ve ever encountered – its old trees bough-bendingly laden with sumptuous white blossom. I lie down under an apple tree in the long meadow grass and find myself daydreaming about hiding in the grounds this evening and spending a night here. Those monks sure knew which side their worldly bread was buttered, and I suspect that Brothers Merrick and Bartholomew knew how to brew up some devilish scrumpy from the fruit of this orchard’s divine forebears.
I emerge to the sight of a blue tent in the paddock – presumably Joe’s – but no signs of life. I have a breakfast banana and then decide to purge my pack of obviously unnecessary things. I end up with a good kilo of superfluous stuff, which I bag up, ready to take to the post office.
I hide my packed bags in a hedge and go for a barefoot walk up the Tor, this time using the rear path. Ah, unburdened of my pack, I feel as nimble as a mountain goat on helium. And barefoot too – that puts lightweight delight in the spring of my step. I love being barefoot – it’s like opening an extra sense in your soles, or making love to the land without a condom. I practically skip and dance my way to the top. Even just three days in, I can feel a new fitness arising in my body.
And it’s great to take in these views in a good mood, because I was pretty ratty yesterday morning. Man, so often I let my undulating moods get in the way of the views that life has to offer, and – maybe more tragically – so often I let my moods get in the way of my fundamental relationship to Life too.
Glastonbury Tor, topped with derelict St Michael’s Tower, is quite a remarkable view and viewing point – and quite a beacon for the imagination too. It’s easy to feel like a king or queen up here, surveying your royal realms. Or you can imagine parallel, fey Arthurian worlds, where angels and archangels and dragons and saints weave their energies and powers and tales. It’s all up here, and more, and I’m even tempted to wager my sleeping bag that William Blake once sat on this very spot, pondering and wondering and dreaming away a fine and sunny morning such as this.
His famous poem floats into my mind:
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England’s pleasant pastures seen!
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green and pleasant Land.
I know I’m late to the mythic party, but only a couple of years ago did I realise that there’s an old and popular myth about Jesus visiting Britain, and that’s what Blake is referring to in the first verse – those ancient feet belong to a young Jesus, brought here by his uncle Joseph of Arimethea. I’d always pictured those feet belonging to some sort of bearded Father God figure – a bit like Blake’s famous Ancient of Days.
Trouble is, it’s nigh on impossible to recall Blake’s famous words without prompting Hubert Parry’s equally famous musical accompaniment from the jukebox of my brain. But what a corker of a combination. Jerusalem – as the hymn and poem are now both known – was our unofficial school anthem, and we used to belt it out on the last day of term as if our lives depended on it. I think part of the poem and hymn’s synthesised genius is that so many different sorts of people enjoy singing it, not just homesick public schoolboys: militant suffragists, urban socialists, rural worshippers, loyal royalists, radical republicans, proud patriots, rowdy rugby fans, and full-throated members of the W.I. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few anarchists and a few fascists have a soft spot for it too. Once the United Kingdom finally unravels into its constituent countries, I’d vote for it to be England’s official national anthem. Either Jerusalem of the Hokey Cokey.
When I get back to the paddock, Joe’s up and packing his tent away. He says he had a bit of a late night last night because there was a little party at the White Spring, and he drank too much cider, which he admits is his favourite tipple. I suspect that there are quite a few little late night parties at the White Spring.
I apologise that I haven’t got any cider, but mention I’ve got a couple of beers. He’s game. So we have one each, and share a hash spliff too – a noble enough hobo breakfast. And Joe tells me some of his story – of bankruptcy and the slide into homelessness. Says he’s slept out in every single town in the south-west. And he actually seems fairly content with the rhythms and rhymes of homeless life – winter, spring, summer and all.
We wander the back road together, and Joe tells me about Richard Whyting, the last Abbot of Glastonbury. “Henry’s men set the church on fire, and hung old Whyting at the same time. They say that from miles around you could see his body dangling, silhouetted against the flames. And every now and then someone in town claims to have seen his ghost, still silhouetted against the flames, and still dangling.”
It sounds like a fable, the way Joe tells it. I look up at the Tor and try to imagine the reality.
“Not only was he hung,” continues Joe, “but his body was then quartered. And one of his limbs stayed in Glastonbury, and the other three went to Bath... and Bridgwater, I think. Can’t remember the fourth. And then, then they hung his head from one of the Abbey gates. Well, they probably skewered it on a spike. They sure didn’t do things by halves back then, did they?”
Even with such gory details, I still can’t quite imagine it. I’m glad my brain files it away as a fable.
We call by the White Spring so that I can fill up with water, and there’s a young man there with a very red and scabby wound on his leg from a recent cycling wipe-out, so I give him the roll of bandage from my first aid kit. “Fortunately, I was drunk at the time, so didn’t feel a thing,” he smiles, with both an ironic twinkle in his eye and a genuine look of good fortune.
Joe and I then head to the High Street and to his preferred begging pitch. I hand him a tenner to start his day. “That hasn’t started my day, Stephen – it’s made it.” We both smile and shake hands. Joe says I’m welcome in his paddock any time, and then disappears off to the shops.
I feel really heartened by my contact with Joe. All these quiet little, unsung acts of welcome and friendliness and generosity – without them surely the world would stop spinning.
I decide to go and visit the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey.
Oh my, what a place – curiously glorious even in its ruined state. And what a place it must have been in its religious heyday: magnificent, pious, prestigious, powerful, abundant, bustling... I dawdle around the ruined buildings in awe, picturing it all back in the day, and even let myself drift off into a parallel world in which Henry hadn’t been the furious megalomaniac that he was, and all the old abbeys of England were still standing intact, and long lineages of nuns and monks were still available to us, offering wisdom and counsel and retreat...
I visit the Lady Chapel. There’s a display panel with an artist’s impression of the chapel in its full, painted glory. Much of the stone would have been painted bright colours – ochre, red, green, blue, white, with black outlines and gold leaf – and adorned with gilded metal ornaments too. It makes me wonder how many of Britain’s churches and abbeys and cathedrals were once similarly coloured. They would have looked so, so different to the honeyed-toned stone creatures that we are used to today.
Then I visit St Joseph’s Well and Crypt. Seems like the cult of Joseph of Arimathea was once upon a time a big part of Glastonbury’s draw, and in many ways still is. I’m sure all the local New Agers are very conversant with it. Not only – so it goes – did Joseph bring the young Jesus to Glastonbury, but he later returned – with the Holy Grail itself – and became the first bishop of the British Isles, founding Britain’s first ever church right here, on this spot. Just the possibility tickles me deep.
Joseph’s Well was a very popular pilgrimage destination for centuries, renowned for miracles and cures. I try to picture all of this – fable and fact and theology all indistinguishable – and feel into it, and feel into the footsteps of those medieval folk, and their beliefs and hopes and struggles. Imagine bringing a sick relative to Glastonbury, and seeing the Abbey for the first time, when all you’ve ever seen and known is your squat village church and the neighbouring hills. And imagine the fear and trembling as you carry your beloved relative down the stone steps to the well, praying with all the might you can muster for his or her healing, all the while fearing their death, and all the while worrying that your faith – or lack of it – might be the most vital component of the whole procedure. And then – unless there was a miracle cure – you’d have to lug your relative back up the steps and somehow make it all the way back home, constantly monitoring their health, desperately looking for signs of improvement, wondering what report to give to the your anxious family members...
Unfortunately, the well is now covered with a big sheet of Perspex. I’m sure they have their reasons, but it feels really sad and bedraggled and disempowered to be thus attired. I get this sort of wistful feeling that we’ve left something behind, and possibly lost it for ever, but haven’t yet found anything to replace it with, and that – on some subterranean collective soulful level – the loss and hunger still haunt us.
In a smug fit of I’m-a-pilgrim-not-a-tourist I almost skip the visitors’ centre, but I’m really glad I don’t. Especially because there’s a fabulous model of the Abbey and it surroundings as they might have looked on the eve of their destruction. I take my donkey hat off to the person or persons who created this. The restored Abbey looks as grand as a cathedral.
On display is also a beautiful statue of the Madonna and Child, with a young toddler Jesus standing in the lap of his mother, his feet held in the taut folds of her dress, his small hands both open and aloft and cradled in hers, as if both of them are both playing together and offering joint blessings to anyone who stands before them. Turns out it’s carved by Eric Gill, and once was lost for forty years – but knowing about Gill’s history of sexual abuse always sours my appreciation of his remarkable art. Not to mention his typefaces.
A painted panel lists the Abbots of Glastonbury, from Worgret in 601 to Whyting in 1525. The pre-Norman names make my brain go dizzy with some sort of pre-Norman magical yearning:
Worgret, Lademund, Bregoret, Beorwald,
Aldbeorth, Atfrith, Guba
Kemgisel, Tica, Cuma, Walthern,
Tumberht, Beadulf, Muca,
Guthlac, Ealmund, Herefyrth, Striwerd,
Ealthun, Aelfric, Dunstan...
I go wandering around the massive Abbey grounds, taking in the site of King Arthur’s tomb, and find myself strolling through the most beautiful orchard I’ve ever encountered – its old trees bough-bendingly laden with sumptuous white blossom. I lie down under an apple tree in the long meadow grass and find myself daydreaming about hiding in the grounds this evening and spending a night here. Those monks sure knew which side their worldly bread was buttered, and I suspect that Brothers Merrick and Bartholomew knew how to brew up some devilish scrumpy from the fruit of this orchard’s divine forebears.
Glastonbury High Street sure ain’t your typical British High Street: Bag End Grow Shop, the Chocolate Love Temple, Presence of the Past, Arcanacadabra, Earthforce, Maharanee’s Palace Boutique... even the Laundry Service is called The Washing Well. I visit the prosaically-named post office in order to send my parcel of superfluities back to my brother, enjoy a coffee and slice of vegan chocolate cake at the Hundredth Monkey, write some postcards, and stick my nose in an esoteric bookshop or two.
Oh my, esoteric people sure have a lot to say about esoteric things, and Glastonbury must be the esoteric capital of Britain, if not one of the esoteric capitals of the world. Can’t some bright spark just discover the metaphysical equivalent of e=mc2 and save some trees? I purchase a little pocket book on forgiveness, and discover the name of the beach where the young Jesus and his uncle Joseph are said to have landed: Glenthorne. Apparently it’s on the Somerset-Devon border, somewhere between Porlock and Lynton – but I can’t find it on my AA road atlas, nor on my Google Maps phone atlas neither. But my interest has been piqued. Both Porlock and an imaginary Glenthorne get circled on my Map of Possibilities.
I’m just walking out of Earthforce, having purchased some food supplies, when two men begin shouting to one another from different sides of the street. Their conversation is both loud and manic and I sense a sort of drug-shaken madness in their voices. It’s obvious that, on some level, they both want the whole world to share some of their internal pressure – I can feel one of the voices drilling into my mind – and something about the whole scene, and the whole High Street vibe, just flips a switch in me. Suddenly I want to get the fuck out of Glastonbury town. I need some fresh, exoteric air!
Maybe the rising feminine attracts the wounded masculine, or maybe Glastonbury has always attracted its fair share of fractured souls – myself included. Or maybe it’s just the cumulative effects of banana, beer, spliff, coffee and vegan chocolate cake. I don’t know. Light and dark, red water and white water, health and unwellness, the feminine and the masculine – all seem to be engaged in quite an intense dance in Glastonbury town. All I know right now is that it’s time to leave. I consult The Map. Porlock’s just up the A39. Porlock it shall be. And maybe I’ll even find Glenthorne, where those ancient feet first set foot?
Walking out of town, I find myself mysteriously drawn down a narrow alleyway and into a gem of a little chapel dedicated to St Margaret. Ah, just the simplicity my soul needs. “Like the Pilgrims before you,” reads a welcoming notice, “Be of Quiet Mind and Voice and find Love, Peace and Blessings upon your path.”
This chapel sure is a proper little oasis of well-seasoned peace, with tea lights shimmering and flickering beneath icons of both St Margaret and Mary Magdalene. I light a candle for mum and dad, and one also for my recently-deceased Uncle Peter – the last of my blood relatives of that generation. I sit in silence a while. I don’t know why my switch just flipped. I try to calm myself with a few deep, meditative breaths, but I can hear the hitch-hiking clock tick-tick-tocking away. I check my phone and am surprised to learn that it’s already five o’clock. Even time seems to do weird and bendy things in Glastonbury town.
Outside the chapel, the sun’s begun clouding over, and a slight stormy edge has appeared in the air. I make up a new sign: A39 PLEASE.
I’ve always had a soft spot for Porlock, ever since, as an eleven-year-old, we studied Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. The story our English teacher told us was that Coleridge had dreamt up the poem literally in a dream, and upon waking had set to, scribbling it down. But then someone had knocked at the door – the mysterious “person from Porlock” – and when he returned to his desk, the rest of the poem had disappeared from his mind. Our teacher got us to draw pictures of Xanadu, and to finish the poem ourselves. I wonder what I wrote? Understandably, our teacher missed out an important piece of background information – Coleridge’s “vision in a dream” was probably opium-induced. Sex, drugs and rhythmic verse all go back a long, long way.
I suppose they were the beatniks of their time, that lot – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Dorothy Wordsworth, William Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley. All impacted the British – and in particular the English – imagination: Frankenstein; A Vindication of the Rights of Women; The Masque of Anarchy; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood; Ode to a Nightingale. Nature, feminism, revolution, psychology, love, spirituality, myth, death, depression, God, godlessness – they covered it all. And some. No wonder the British state sent out its spies among them.
I was in love with Keats’s poetry when I was a teenager.
Darkling I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such ecstasy!
Hmmm. Come to think of it – this explains quite a lot. Be very careful about the poetry you feed your children.
Two guys on their way home from work rescue me from Glastonbury. One’s a local Somerset lad, the other a settler from Latvia. They both work in a stone quarry connected to the construction of Hinckley B – I guess you need a lot of fresh stone to make a nuclear power station. The Somerset lad asks me why I’m doing what I’m doing.
“I think I’m trying to close a difficult chapter in my life,” I say, “and trying to open myself up to a new one.” And then I instantly wonder if I sound like a lost and bourgeois hippie-loon.
He swings round and his bright blue eyes are wide open and he makes sure – through his eyes – that I get it that he gets it. That life can be difficult, and sometimes we have to set out on journeys, even if we don’t know where we’re heading. No words are needed.
Or maybe that was his Do-You-Realise-What-A-Lost-And-Bourgeois-Hippie-Loon-You-Sound-Like-Right-Now-Mate stare? I’ll never know.
They drop me off in Bridgwater.
I know you shouldn’t judge a town by the occupants of its Monday evening traffic, but the folk of Bridgwater don’t look happy at all. Apart from the three youngsters who came hurtling around the roundabout in a purple Fiesta, windows down, tunes blaring, chortling away, probably high on finest Somerset skunk.
After half an hour a car pulls over, and when we get talking about Porlock and Coleridge and Xanadu and the Romantic poets, and pubs and sacred places, she says I should visit her village pub. Which is precisely where she drops me – outside the Ancient Mariner in Nether Stowey, right opposite Coleridge’s old house. He didn’t have far to crawl home, then.
I don’t quite know what I was expecting – perhaps some sort of smoke-filled, oak-beamed, saggy-ceilinged den of bohemians and revolutionaries and pamphleteers – but the Ancient Mariner’s twenty-first century incarnation doesn’t knock me out. Still, I buy a pint of wedding-themed Royal Salute, wonder how their honeymoon is going, and cadge a ciggie out the front from a wonderfully friendly stocky troll of a man, who blesses me on my way.
I walk back up to the A39, stick out my thumb, and the first car pulls over – an ex-hitcher who’s only going a few miles but knows of a better hitching spot. He recommends I go to Witchet Quay to see the statue of the Ancient Mariner, complete with albatross hanging around his neck. He drops me off and, again, the first car pulls over, and takes me to Willington, recommending The Bottom Ship at Porlock Weir.
I stand in Willington for a while, and although the hitching omens aren’t great – one-horse Somerset town, Monday evening, sun going down – I suddenly feel an old part of me return. It’s almost a physical sensation. As if an important portion of my soul has just returned, after considerable absence. And I find myself smiling, and whispering to myself, I know this realm, I know this realm. And, for whatever mysterious reasons, a great peace and presence settles upon me. And I realise that I’m finally on the road.
I’m finally on the road!
After twenty minutes or so, just when I’m beginning to wonder if I should call it a day and go in search of a nearby copse to kip in, a taxi pulls over, with a mother and child in the back seat. I chuck my bags in his boot and get in the passenger seat. The meter is already reading over £60. “I like picking up hitchers,” he says. And then a bit louder, so that the woman in the back can hear: “At least I get to choose who I pick up, whereas with customers I don’t get any choice at all.” They both laugh.
They’re heading for Minehead. Part of the A39 is closed for roadworks, but he knows all the back roads, and we zip along them, complete with running commentary – “We are now driving along the longest ford in England” – and when he discovers my mission, he decides to take me on a tour of local churches, including a whistle stop in the medieval village of Dunster, which I must visit properly one day. All the while the fare is rising, and it takes me a while to work out that it’s his daughter and grandson in the back, and they’ve all been on a ride out to pick up the swanky new meter that’s now digitally incorporated into his rear view mirror.
“Oh, I’ve got to take you to see the Old Ship Aground, right next to a church it is.” And into Minehead we go. And there it is, a pub squashed right up against a simple little chapel or church. By now the sun has fallen into the sea, and I reckon Minehead’s as far as I’m going to get today.
“Ah, I suppose we can take you all the way to Porlock,” he says, with a friendly smile. And we’re off again, zooming along another back road in order to pause outside quite a quirky church – all freshly whitewashed on the outside, apart from its mock crenellations and window arches.
He drops me off next to St Dubricius’ church in Porlock, replete with garish fluorescent cross atop its weirdly truncated spire. “You’ve got to visit the church in Culbone,” he says. “The smallest in Britain.” The meter is now reading nearly £110. “I’ll let you off.”
“You could set up a new business, you know,” I suggest. “Pitstop Pilgrimages: a hundred Somerset churches in a hundred minutes.”
We shake hands, and off they go, whizzing back to Minehead, meter still running.
I plonk my bags down and stand on the pavement for a good five minutes, just gently shaking my head, and smiling at the nuttiness of that taxi ride, and the nuttiness of hitching, and the friendliness of the human race.
I walk from Porlock, through West Porlock, to Porlock Weir, occasionally flashing my head torch whenever vehicles approach, but by the time I get to The Bottom Ship I have no enthusiasm for beer whatsoever – I don’t even check to see if it’s open. I just want sleep. And I need it soon. I find the coastal path, trudge up into some woods, find the first flat piece of ground I can, inflate my sleeping mat, climb into my sleeping bag, plump up my clothes bag into a pillow – can’t even be arsed to inflate my inflatable pillow – put both my night cap and mozzie hat on, and swiftly roll over into my own snoozy Xanadu...
Oh my, esoteric people sure have a lot to say about esoteric things, and Glastonbury must be the esoteric capital of Britain, if not one of the esoteric capitals of the world. Can’t some bright spark just discover the metaphysical equivalent of e=mc2 and save some trees? I purchase a little pocket book on forgiveness, and discover the name of the beach where the young Jesus and his uncle Joseph are said to have landed: Glenthorne. Apparently it’s on the Somerset-Devon border, somewhere between Porlock and Lynton – but I can’t find it on my AA road atlas, nor on my Google Maps phone atlas neither. But my interest has been piqued. Both Porlock and an imaginary Glenthorne get circled on my Map of Possibilities.
I’m just walking out of Earthforce, having purchased some food supplies, when two men begin shouting to one another from different sides of the street. Their conversation is both loud and manic and I sense a sort of drug-shaken madness in their voices. It’s obvious that, on some level, they both want the whole world to share some of their internal pressure – I can feel one of the voices drilling into my mind – and something about the whole scene, and the whole High Street vibe, just flips a switch in me. Suddenly I want to get the fuck out of Glastonbury town. I need some fresh, exoteric air!
Maybe the rising feminine attracts the wounded masculine, or maybe Glastonbury has always attracted its fair share of fractured souls – myself included. Or maybe it’s just the cumulative effects of banana, beer, spliff, coffee and vegan chocolate cake. I don’t know. Light and dark, red water and white water, health and unwellness, the feminine and the masculine – all seem to be engaged in quite an intense dance in Glastonbury town. All I know right now is that it’s time to leave. I consult The Map. Porlock’s just up the A39. Porlock it shall be. And maybe I’ll even find Glenthorne, where those ancient feet first set foot?
Walking out of town, I find myself mysteriously drawn down a narrow alleyway and into a gem of a little chapel dedicated to St Margaret. Ah, just the simplicity my soul needs. “Like the Pilgrims before you,” reads a welcoming notice, “Be of Quiet Mind and Voice and find Love, Peace and Blessings upon your path.”
This chapel sure is a proper little oasis of well-seasoned peace, with tea lights shimmering and flickering beneath icons of both St Margaret and Mary Magdalene. I light a candle for mum and dad, and one also for my recently-deceased Uncle Peter – the last of my blood relatives of that generation. I sit in silence a while. I don’t know why my switch just flipped. I try to calm myself with a few deep, meditative breaths, but I can hear the hitch-hiking clock tick-tick-tocking away. I check my phone and am surprised to learn that it’s already five o’clock. Even time seems to do weird and bendy things in Glastonbury town.
Outside the chapel, the sun’s begun clouding over, and a slight stormy edge has appeared in the air. I make up a new sign: A39 PLEASE.
I’ve always had a soft spot for Porlock, ever since, as an eleven-year-old, we studied Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. The story our English teacher told us was that Coleridge had dreamt up the poem literally in a dream, and upon waking had set to, scribbling it down. But then someone had knocked at the door – the mysterious “person from Porlock” – and when he returned to his desk, the rest of the poem had disappeared from his mind. Our teacher got us to draw pictures of Xanadu, and to finish the poem ourselves. I wonder what I wrote? Understandably, our teacher missed out an important piece of background information – Coleridge’s “vision in a dream” was probably opium-induced. Sex, drugs and rhythmic verse all go back a long, long way.
I suppose they were the beatniks of their time, that lot – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Dorothy Wordsworth, William Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley. All impacted the British – and in particular the English – imagination: Frankenstein; A Vindication of the Rights of Women; The Masque of Anarchy; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood; Ode to a Nightingale. Nature, feminism, revolution, psychology, love, spirituality, myth, death, depression, God, godlessness – they covered it all. And some. No wonder the British state sent out its spies among them.
I was in love with Keats’s poetry when I was a teenager.
Darkling I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such ecstasy!
Hmmm. Come to think of it – this explains quite a lot. Be very careful about the poetry you feed your children.
Two guys on their way home from work rescue me from Glastonbury. One’s a local Somerset lad, the other a settler from Latvia. They both work in a stone quarry connected to the construction of Hinckley B – I guess you need a lot of fresh stone to make a nuclear power station. The Somerset lad asks me why I’m doing what I’m doing.
“I think I’m trying to close a difficult chapter in my life,” I say, “and trying to open myself up to a new one.” And then I instantly wonder if I sound like a lost and bourgeois hippie-loon.
He swings round and his bright blue eyes are wide open and he makes sure – through his eyes – that I get it that he gets it. That life can be difficult, and sometimes we have to set out on journeys, even if we don’t know where we’re heading. No words are needed.
Or maybe that was his Do-You-Realise-What-A-Lost-And-Bourgeois-Hippie-Loon-You-Sound-Like-Right-Now-Mate stare? I’ll never know.
They drop me off in Bridgwater.
I know you shouldn’t judge a town by the occupants of its Monday evening traffic, but the folk of Bridgwater don’t look happy at all. Apart from the three youngsters who came hurtling around the roundabout in a purple Fiesta, windows down, tunes blaring, chortling away, probably high on finest Somerset skunk.
After half an hour a car pulls over, and when we get talking about Porlock and Coleridge and Xanadu and the Romantic poets, and pubs and sacred places, she says I should visit her village pub. Which is precisely where she drops me – outside the Ancient Mariner in Nether Stowey, right opposite Coleridge’s old house. He didn’t have far to crawl home, then.
I don’t quite know what I was expecting – perhaps some sort of smoke-filled, oak-beamed, saggy-ceilinged den of bohemians and revolutionaries and pamphleteers – but the Ancient Mariner’s twenty-first century incarnation doesn’t knock me out. Still, I buy a pint of wedding-themed Royal Salute, wonder how their honeymoon is going, and cadge a ciggie out the front from a wonderfully friendly stocky troll of a man, who blesses me on my way.
I walk back up to the A39, stick out my thumb, and the first car pulls over – an ex-hitcher who’s only going a few miles but knows of a better hitching spot. He recommends I go to Witchet Quay to see the statue of the Ancient Mariner, complete with albatross hanging around his neck. He drops me off and, again, the first car pulls over, and takes me to Willington, recommending The Bottom Ship at Porlock Weir.
I stand in Willington for a while, and although the hitching omens aren’t great – one-horse Somerset town, Monday evening, sun going down – I suddenly feel an old part of me return. It’s almost a physical sensation. As if an important portion of my soul has just returned, after considerable absence. And I find myself smiling, and whispering to myself, I know this realm, I know this realm. And, for whatever mysterious reasons, a great peace and presence settles upon me. And I realise that I’m finally on the road.
I’m finally on the road!
After twenty minutes or so, just when I’m beginning to wonder if I should call it a day and go in search of a nearby copse to kip in, a taxi pulls over, with a mother and child in the back seat. I chuck my bags in his boot and get in the passenger seat. The meter is already reading over £60. “I like picking up hitchers,” he says. And then a bit louder, so that the woman in the back can hear: “At least I get to choose who I pick up, whereas with customers I don’t get any choice at all.” They both laugh.
They’re heading for Minehead. Part of the A39 is closed for roadworks, but he knows all the back roads, and we zip along them, complete with running commentary – “We are now driving along the longest ford in England” – and when he discovers my mission, he decides to take me on a tour of local churches, including a whistle stop in the medieval village of Dunster, which I must visit properly one day. All the while the fare is rising, and it takes me a while to work out that it’s his daughter and grandson in the back, and they’ve all been on a ride out to pick up the swanky new meter that’s now digitally incorporated into his rear view mirror.
“Oh, I’ve got to take you to see the Old Ship Aground, right next to a church it is.” And into Minehead we go. And there it is, a pub squashed right up against a simple little chapel or church. By now the sun has fallen into the sea, and I reckon Minehead’s as far as I’m going to get today.
“Ah, I suppose we can take you all the way to Porlock,” he says, with a friendly smile. And we’re off again, zooming along another back road in order to pause outside quite a quirky church – all freshly whitewashed on the outside, apart from its mock crenellations and window arches.
He drops me off next to St Dubricius’ church in Porlock, replete with garish fluorescent cross atop its weirdly truncated spire. “You’ve got to visit the church in Culbone,” he says. “The smallest in Britain.” The meter is now reading nearly £110. “I’ll let you off.”
“You could set up a new business, you know,” I suggest. “Pitstop Pilgrimages: a hundred Somerset churches in a hundred minutes.”
We shake hands, and off they go, whizzing back to Minehead, meter still running.
I plonk my bags down and stand on the pavement for a good five minutes, just gently shaking my head, and smiling at the nuttiness of that taxi ride, and the nuttiness of hitching, and the friendliness of the human race.
I walk from Porlock, through West Porlock, to Porlock Weir, occasionally flashing my head torch whenever vehicles approach, but by the time I get to The Bottom Ship I have no enthusiasm for beer whatsoever – I don’t even check to see if it’s open. I just want sleep. And I need it soon. I find the coastal path, trudge up into some woods, find the first flat piece of ground I can, inflate my sleeping mat, climb into my sleeping bag, plump up my clothes bag into a pillow – can’t even be arsed to inflate my inflatable pillow – put both my night cap and mozzie hat on, and swiftly roll over into my own snoozy Xanadu...
Kubla Khan
(Or, a vision in a dream.)
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise...
(Or, a vision in a dream.)
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise...