It’s 10.00 in the morning and we’re parked in a country lane, in Glastonbury. You may be scandalised, but we’re parked beside a sign that reads disabled badge holders only. Now, though you may have your doubts, I’m not disabled; well, not unless I drink eight pints of Stella and wake Lesley up at four in the morning, stark naked and holding a daffodil between my teeth, then she'll definitely disable me.

If somebody disabled comes along, we’ll move the car. Failing that, we’re sitting here having a cup of tea.

There are a few other vehicles in the lane, in the disabled spaces. One is a silver hatchback. The others are campervans, populated by ‘crusties.’ They have dreadlocks, or skinheads, and are dressed quite warmly and look like they smell of earth and damp. One of them is holding a happy looking baby up on his shoulders. Another is emptying a plastic washing up bowl. A tall skinny guy with shorts and a hooded top is brushing his teeth. Sitting on a box, a girl with brown hair and a tie die skirt and green woollen cardigan is writing in a spiral bound notebook. The pages lift and flit with the breeze every now and then. I wonder what she’s writing; probably something about me looking like I would smell of damp too. I can hear a child off in the field singing, ‘la la la la la la…’ birds are chirruping and tweeting and warbling. All of a sudden, I feel somewhat left out of nature's tableau, at the thought that I can’t recognise any bird song. I can’t recognise any birds by sight other than chickens, but that’s only because I recognise a Colonel Saunders box when I see one. It was quite late in life before I realised chickens were born with feathers and not breadcrumbs.

          Actually, now I think of it, chickens aren’t born with feathers are they? They are quite featherless when they come out of the shell. Each one looks like a mutant scrotum that has been born into the world, saggy skinned and looking rather ridiculous but still hoping to get close to the nearest bird; a bit like the real thing.

       Beside me Lesley is reading the Daily Mail, a paper which I hold in a certain degree of contempt, with the exception of the cartoons which are rather good. I consider asking the ‘crusties’ if they want something to add to their stock of toilet paper but the Mail is so rabidly conservative it just might bite them on the arse if they condescended to use it. And it’s usually full of crap anyway. The article Lesley is reading is about a man who was fined £75 for tapping the ash off his cigarette out of his car window. This is ridiculous when the exhaust fumes from the car he is in, would have been doing more damage to the environment. What next? Fines for breaking wind in a lift?

          To my right, behind a leafy hedge, with gnarled and wizened branches is a grassy hill. Its called the Tor.  Atop the hill is an ancient ruined church tower.   It’s supposed to be quite a magical place, in the esoteric sense of the word. I don’t know if this is true or not, though both Lesley and I found that, as we neared the place, both our temperatures suddenly went up. In fact, as I sit here writing this I’m on the verge of breaking out into a sweat, even though the day is quite chilly, and the chill is being carried subtly through to my bones on a breeze that blows intermittently. It is thought that the Tor, has been sacred to mankind in one form or the other, since time began (...around 7.30pm, many years ago). Christianity came along and built a church on top of what had been a sacred site for the pagans.  Essentially, they turned God into a squatter, but this was nothing new. Christianity took over sites and dates that were sacred to other faiths throughout history, and then, considering themselves to be the true religion, they blew a raspberry at the pagan Gods. That may be why, a bolt of lightening demolished the church, with the exception of the tower.  You can see it above, on the skyline, looking like a single finger, raised to the arrogance of Christianity.

Glastonbury has long been associated with magic. Indeed Violet Mary Firth Evans (Dion Fortune,) had a house, Chalice Orchard at the foot of the Tor. Consequently, the place has attracted more than its fair share of hippies, new age travellers, occultists, crack pots, Christians and nutters than just about any place in England; it gathers them in like a huge open air dole office. Violet was a writer whose work stemmed from her knowledge of the occult. Occult, of course, simply means hidden knowledge, and the practice of it takes two forms. One form is the left hand path, in which the knowledge is used for selfish reasons, and the other, the right hand path is used in a selfless manner, for the good of others. It's a simple definition but it will do. People have many misconceptions about occultism mainly derived from bad t.v. and films. The latin mass for example was a form of occultism. For that matter, at one point herbalism was regarded as occultism, and practitioners of it were often persecuted or murdered. In a way, it is a kind of science of the mind, using ritual and symbols and invocation to influence what happens for good or for bad; again, like the latin mass, or a hindu puja, or blessing yourself, or throwing salt over your shoulder.

 Lesley is asleep now. We started off this morning at 4:00 am and she's taking a little nap. The wind rustles outside the open car window. Three white horses clip clop by. I’m surprised they don’t wake her up. There’s quite a lot of noise. Mind you, it is the sighing and rustling and movement of Mother Nature, so I guess that’s alright. It is after all Her planet so I guess She is entitled to make Her presence felt. We’re the one’s who should shut the fuck up for a while; like the plane that’s flying overhead, ripping a gash of pollution through the tufts of white cloud that move across the blue sky.

         Lesley doesn’t even stir when a blue bus pulls up, virtually beside us, and the doors clatter open. It disgorges people in a curious procession of children first, and then some more people who are slightly older, and then older still, and yet again some people who are even older than that. I watch them, bemused, expecting Methuselah to step out, closely followed by the Grim Reaper and then Keith Richards; but no, they don’t appear. The driver is the last one out, lifting his leg slightly to remove, I presume, his shorts which have wedged up his cleft. That done, he starts crunching on a technicolor orange carrot before climbing back in the bus, clattering the door shut with a pneumatic whoosh, and then driving off; and still Lesley doesn’t stir.

          Then I wake her by blinking too loudly.

          The plan was to go for a walk up the Tor when she woke up. However, the sign for disabled parking worried us a bit. What if we get clamped, or get a ticket, or both, or Stephen Hawking turned up to go downhill racing? We decided it was too great a risk and went to Glastonbury town centre instead.

...in Glastonbury town

          We stop on the busy high street, parking up outside a shop with two tacky, semi-nude Egyptian figures in the window. They are painted gold, with colourful headdresses, and wearing very  tight skirts. I’m reminded of Tom Cruise; they look like they are members of some kind of cult, seriously overpriced, and the same size as your average ten year old. I think they are supposed to look mysterious and inviting to the people ambling by in the sun soaked street. They just look like an advert for a seriously gay massage parlour for midgets.

          A man with a white beard and straggly white hair walks past. He looks in, momentarily, and shakes his head at the sight. Then he turns and walks off down the street. I noticed he had brown tobacco stains around his hairy mouth, discolouring his beard. It looked like the cloacae of an unhygienic bear.

       The shop isn’t unusual. There are lots of shops with the equivalent of the golden Egyptian love boy midgets. One shop for example, is full of old fossils; no, not the obligatory Oxfam shop with pensioners thumbing surreptitiously through the secondhand books, looking for something with a bit of sex in it. I mean real fossils; the skeletons of dead animals that have been clenched for a million years between layers of rock. One of which has lain there undisturbed until possibly a caveman thought, ‘hey, I can use this to get a cave for myself by hitting someone with it; this he did, and it worked but it broke in the process and so he threw it away and got another one. Millions of years after that, another guy comes along, sees a fossil in the broken rock and says, ‘hey, some idiot will buy this!’ and then hits a relative of the first caveman with a bill for £60.

          There are still cavemen in Glastonbury. They are sitting on a bench with cans of beer. They have their shirts open, and beads on, and have rather more hair on their chests than is healthy on a Homo Sapien. Several of them have their ears and noses pierced and I dread to think what else. They have more rings than the speaking clock.

         The smell of incense wafts indolently out of many of the shops and a lot of the women seem to be dressed in loose fitting tie dyed dresses; at least the ones who aren’t dressed in black like they are auditioning for the part of Morticia in the Addams family; and the last time I saw that much eye shadow it was on a frigid panda. There were bracelets and love beads at a ratio of probably seven to one per bar of soap.

          The rest of the people look quite normal. It was like two parallel universes, shopping together. I was taken aback by the amount of inordinately tanned men in loose shirts with long hair and a bald spot.

          And wouldn’t you know it. I knew it before I even got to Glastonbury. Someone down the road is playing a flute. He probably has two incense sticks sticking out of his ears. I don’t go to look. I go with Lesley to look in the bookshops. This is possibly the best thing about the town itself, for us; books. I buy one on barefoot Shiatsu. I was a qualified, insured practitioner for a few years. Yes; I too, have hugged trees like some of the people who are walking around me now in Glastonbury.

          Lesley goes back to the car to eat a very expensive cheese and broccoli slice, and I wander a bit further. I see a noticeboard, displaying several notices for new age therapies. I may have been a practitioner myself, but at least what I did has some kind of medical background and closely relates to acupuncture. I never realised how much of a cynic I am until I see stuff like I see advertised here.

          These are all one day workshops, by the way:

          ‘Rediscover Your Self Esteem’…hmmm… yes… it’s amazing what you find down the back of the sofa.

          ‘Esoteric Soul Healing’… say what? How can you heal your soul? That’s like a glove puppet turning to you and saying, ‘you look a bit peaky.’

          ‘The Heart of the Goddess’… yes, I tried that once and she said I gave Her heartburn.

          How about ‘An Esoteric Soul Healing Taster’… a taster? I’m not letting a complete stranger lick my soul unless I know where they’ve been.

          And my favourite one, I think, as I stand looking at the picture of the chap involved is called ‘Healing Vibrations’. The healing vibration he is most in need of is a dentist drill. He’s got teeth like Stonehenge on a wet Monday.

          Yes, I sigh, to myself and the picture of one of the women pictured on one of the little adverts. I guess I am a cynical bastard, dear Lotus Petal Moonbeam or whatever the fuck your name is.    

We want to know where Violet Mary Firth Evans otherwise known as Dion Fortune is buried. That is one of the reasons why we have made this detour to Glastonbury although we are on our way to Dorset in the South of England. So we ask in the bookshops and get various replies. My favourite solution to the conundrum of ‘where is Dion Fortune buried?’ is given by an earnest young man with glasses. He says, in a confidential tone, ‘have you tried the cemetery?’ I don’t know why but we are under the impression that there might be more than one cemetery in Glastonbury. It turns out we are wrong, there is only one and so we set off to find the grave of Dion Fortune, who, in terms of the occult, walked the Right Hand Path. If you don’t know what this means, don’t worry about it. Let’s just say we have a great deal of respect for her.

          That’s why we first go to the supermarket to buy flowers; a gift to lay on her grave, a token of affection for what survives in the afterlife. While I wait outside the shop, I notice that everybody here looks normal. I wonder where the hippies and the tapestry skirt brigade buy their food? Perhaps they live on fairy dust, highly nutritious karma and organic moonbeams whilst they live in fear of their friends finding out, deep at heart, they really want to be accountants or dentists.

          Lesley comes back to the car with some white roses.

          ‘You’ll never believe how slow they are in there,’ she says, putting on her seatbelt.

          Must be the organic moonbeam juice, I think, as I take us out of the car park.

          ‘And,’ she continues, ‘some of the locals in there look like the result of some serious inbreeding.’

          ‘Oh, yes?’ I say, turning on to the busy main road.

‘Yes. I saw a few who looked like they’ve been assembled from spare parts.’

I laugh at the image and watch the road signs. I’m looking for the one that says cemetery on it. I see one that says, leisure centre which is kind of in the right direction, because if anyone has time on their hands, it's surely the dead.  We finally find the right road and arrive at the cemetery.

 
There’s a lady passing by outside the cemetery with a couple of bags of shopping. I stop the car beside her and ask her a question. We have been driving up and down the front of the cemetery and not found where you can drive in. It turns out that it isn’t a drive in cemetery. I don’t know why I presumed it would be; this one isn’t after all. We have to park the car and make our way up to the entrance on foot, so we do. I had rather embarrassed myself by asking the woman ‘how do I get in the cemetery?’ She looked at me quizzically, and before she could say, ‘have you tried holding your breath for a couple of months?’ I cut her off and said, ‘I mean without actually dying. We want to visit, not take up permanent residence.’

          She was the one who told us to park up and walk.

I lock the car up and Lesley, clutching her flowers, disappears through the large, black gate of iron railings. They must be purely decorative. It’s not as if anybody has ever escaped, after all.  I follow Lesley through the gates, thanking God that they are not pearly and St Paul isn’t sitting behind them, tapping his watch and saying, ‘what time to do you call this?’

There is no sign of Lesley when I enter. There are, however, hundreds of graves. It seems death is quite popular in Glastonbury. I start to stroll between the graves at one end of the… um, it feels a little morbid saying cemetery all the time. I’ll just refer to it from now on as the 'horizontal holding area,’ and those interred therein as very satisfied customers. Well, nobody has complained as yet.

I finally spot Lesley in the distance and join her.  We walk along, scanning the names on the tombstones. After about twenty minutes of this we are having no luck in finding either of the names we are looking for; Violet Mary Firth or her magical name of Dion Fortune. I start to wonder if we would ever find her. The graves seem endless. They might have forever, but we don’t. Thus, we concentrate in one particular area where the deaths seem to have occurred in the 1940s which is round about the right time. Dion Fortune died in 1946.

          Lesley suddenly finds an important clue. She spots the name of Charles Loveday. He was a close personal friend and co-worker of Dion. And then a few graves away is the grave of Dion herself.  It looks old and worn, lichen having eaten away the stone. Its two metal flower pots are rusted, heavy and shaped into six pointed stars. Lesley asks me to get some fresh water for the flowers she has brought. Tenderly she touches the cold face of the weathered headstone, where her name can still be seen. Stagnant water slops onto my hands when I lift the vases up. I carry them down the slope, which is uneven and difficult to walk on with sunken old graves and new graves protruding softly under the grass. Down at the tap provided for replenishing the water in vases, I look up at Lesley. She sits by the grave, as if with an old friend.

          I return with the vases, water slopping quietly. We place the flowers, white roses, upon the grave, but not for the body. The body eventually failed her, as it will fail all of us. But we lay flowers in the footsteps of a soul that dances upon the Right Hand Path…

          Dragonflies flit and swoop in the sun as we leave the cemetery

    (Extract from diary the following day now follows...)
    Last night, we slept rather well in an old pub, not far from the sea in Dorset. Not because I had passed out under the table, but because we had taken a room. It was clean and had hot water, facilities to make tea and there was a bath; all well and good. Sure, it had been a little loud with the other guests in the bar downstairs, but we didn’t mind. We were so tired it didn’t disturb us and we slept deeply, dreamless and drowsy when we woke.

I look at the clock. Time to get up, wash, pack and head downstairs to load the car up before breakfast. Down we go only to find the doors into the pub and the dining room are locked.

‘Hello?’ I call.

No answer. No kitchen sounds or voices either.

I bang on the doors to no avail. Where the hell is everybody? We then find that the outside doors are locked too.  Finally we exit via a fire escape and load up the car.

Slightly irritated, I wander around the front of the premises, wanting my breakfast and to settle the bill; to find that all the doors are locked. All the lights are off. Somewhat bemused I wander around the outside of the building looking for somebody to feed us. I double check to find that every door is locked, every light is off, and every window is closed. I circumnavigate the building and there is nobody to be seen or heard. I ring the rusty bell at the front door. No answer. I called up to an open window for a minute before realising that is the room we have just vacated. Again I peer through the windows, hoping to see someone but there is no-one to be seen. The building is devoid of all forms of life other than a single fly caught in a thick web above the door.

Where the hell is everybody?

I stand back from the building and look up at the sign. Have we by some strange quirk of fate been staying at the public house equivalent of the Marie Celeste? Again I wander around the building and for the first time I see a cage with a few parrots. So, the Marie Celeste theory solidifies. The captain's parrot, presuming he had one stares back at me with glassy eyes. Now, I’m not a parrot expert; far from it, but the parrot looked a little worried… dare I say… scared.

          It was all starting to seem more than a little odd, in fact downright eerie. How can the whole complement of staff disappear from a hotel/bar/restaurant? I looked around the play area and noticed little signs that read:-

          Jesus. How dangerous can this place be, and how many fatalities are they expecting to put up signs like that?

          I noticed a tree, a stunted, grotesquely shape tree rigid in sapless rigor mortis, branches like claws reaching up toward the sky. It had a sign saying, ‘THIS TREE IS DEAD’.

          Good God, I thought to myself. We’re in Bates Motel. I turned around to run back to Lesley who I had left by the car and…

          Shit!  I jump out of my skin.

          There's a man standing right behind me, like an oak tree, wide and tall and rotund and scratching his chin. I could hear the rasp. A little trickle of dried blood was on his chin.

          ‘You’ve… eh… got blood on your chin,’ I said.

          ‘What?’ the man said, rubbing it off. ‘Oh, roight, oi cut moiself shavin,’

          I pointed to the building and said, ‘there’s nobody there. It’s abandoned. We’ve been waiting since 8.15 this morning for breakfast.’

          ‘It’s open. We’ve bin waitin’ for you.’

          ‘No.’ I said,’ it’s closed. I’ve been all round it. The lights are off, the doors are locked. Nobody answers the bell.’

          ‘Moi woife ‘as been waitin’ for you since twenty minutes past eight,’ he said, and then he walked away, round the back of the building. I stood there for a minute, doubting my own sanity, which I usually do every couple of hours anyway, but I could see on this occasion I’d have to be doing it more often. I returned to Lesley.

          ‘It’s open,’ I said.

          ‘It’s not,’ she replied. ‘I just tried the door.’

          I went and tried it myself…

          It opened.

          We looked at each other; our eyebrows raised in surrender to that single odd fact and in we went. I saw the wide, muscular back of a lady in a pink tabard, leaning over what was obviously our table. At least I say lady, because from the back it looked like the man I had spoken too a few minutes ago, except for the blonde hair. I hoped she didn’t turn around because I was sure it was going to be him, wearing a mop on his head. She disappeared out of sight. We sat down and the man came back into the room.

          ‘Oi reckon you’ll be ‘avin’ full English Breakfast?’ he asked, holding a very sharp pencil in his meaty paw.

          ‘Eh… yes,’ I said.

          Lesley said, ‘do you have any mushrooms?’

          He looked at her with an odd expression on his face, and repeated the word, ‘mushrooms?’ as if she had just asked him if he had a fungal infection. A fly buzzed into the silence.

          ‘Yes,’ Lesley said, ‘you know, like mushrooms and eggs?’

          ‘Oi’ll see what oi can do’ he said, slouching off toward the kitchen door. Naturally it creaked like the door of a mausoleum when he opened it.

          ‘How very strange,’ Lesley said, rummaging around in her handbag, fruitlessly as it happened. ‘Bugger,’ she said, ‘darling can you pop out to the car and get my cigarettes for me?’

          I went, and took the time to light up while I was out there.

          When I came back it was to see the back of the blonde woman, just departing after putting the food on the table. I sat with Lesley and watched the big woman departing into the kitchen.

          ‘Thank you, ‘Lesley said.

          I gestured over my shoulder with a thumb toward the kitchen door, and asked, ‘do you think…? I paused. It was too bizarre to even ask the question.

          ‘Do I think what?’ Lesley asked.

          ‘Oh, nothing,’ I said, and tucked into my breakfast.

          Lesley tucked into her eggs and mushrooms and when we had finished, she settled the bill and we departed. I was glad to leave, I must admit.

          ‘That was very strange,’ I said, driving out of the car park.

          ‘Very,’ Lesley said, looking at the map.

          We were quiet for a few minutes, then Lesley said, ‘okay, turn here, which I did. We ambled down a picturesque country road with green hills lazily rolling over on either side.

          ‘So,’ I said,  ‘where are we heading?’

          ‘A place called Upway. There’s a 13^th century church there.’

          ‘Oh, good,’ I said, ‘hey…how about we go to Portsmouth later and see the HMS Victory?’

          ‘Yes, Nelson's flagship. I think it would be better to do that tomorrow, maybe. It’s a very long way away; Hampshire.’

          ‘Okay’ I said.

          ‘Great. Actually, I asked the woman who brought the breakfast if it was worth seeing and she said it was.’

          ‘Oh? Has she seen it herself?’

          ‘No. She said she’s too big to get between the decks of the ship.’

          ‘Really; did you suggest stooping?’

          ‘No, but I thought that was a peculiar thing to say. I did ask her if she’d read any Patrick O’Brien.’

          Patrick O’Brien is the foremost author of Navel literature with his Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin novels, set in the 18^th century, not long after the death of Nelson on the deck of the HMS Victory at Trafalgar. I’m almost as big a fan of them, as Lesley is.

          ‘Oh, had she?’

          ‘She said no, she hadn’t.’

          ‘Oh. That’s a pity.’

          ‘I asked her if she knew what I was talking about.’

          ‘And did she?’

          ‘She said, no.’

          I laughed.

Lesley looked thoughtful for a moment and then said, ‘very odd.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It always surprises me when people haven’t heard of Patrick O’Brien.’

‘No, not that,’ Lesley said, ‘I just thought it was very odd that she had such a deep voice.’

          I nearly crashed the car.

Speaking of which; crashes, that is, T.E Lawrence died in a motorbike crash. T.E. Lawrence, best known as Lawrence of Arabia, lived in Dorset; well, until he died in Dorset and was buried in the cemetery at Moreton. We went along to pay our respects. We have come to pay our respects to a legendary figure in our history books. He was bitterly disappointed that the British government reneged on the deal to give Palestine to the Arabs in return for their part in defeating the Turks in the Middle East. I wonder, had we honoured that promise, would there be peace in the Middle East now? I don’t know.

I do know it is very peaceful here in the cemetery, beneath the branches of an old blue fir tree, swaddled in shade, as Lawrence is, in his grave. The flowers upon it are fresh, which is good to see, and people come along intermittently, walking up the path to the grave as if they are in church. People take pictures, just as I did; something I thought I never would. I feel quite odd about that kind of thing, but I feel it is okay with Lawrence. This does not disturb the peace; nor does the breeze that hushes through the trees, and shakes the leaves like the prelude to a shamanic incantation. On the grave I see two crosses, little wooden things, and one of them has a cryptic message on. I say cryptic, but it is only thus because I do not understand it. It could be the equivalent of ‘no milk today. I have gone away for some time.’ Someone has left a cigar between the pages of a stone book, at the foot of the grave.

I am in quite a reflective mood; not sad, but aware that if death comes to the immortals, such as Lawrence, or those who have walked the line between the worlds, such as Dion Fortune, then death comes to us all; those who mistake Peter O’Toole for the real Lawrence, or those of us whose participation in spiritual practices goes no further than extending one's tongue for the sacrament at mass; or blessing oneself.

How to deal with death, I wonder? Ignore it, perhaps, not that it will go away. Buy a nice hat for the occasion? Accept it as being the initiation into something more; a simplification or sleep or an awakening.

I sit back on the wooden seat beside the grave and light a cigarette, a little invocation to death itself, I guess; suicide on an instalment plan.

I become a little morbid, and then remember how the post office deals with death. When a parcel comes back from an address where the occupier is no longer there, they put a little sticker on it which says, ‘No Longer at This Address’

I stand, and walk over to where Lesley is sitting, across the other side of the graveyard. Then I pause, and look back to where the remains of Lawrence lie, beneath the gravel; beneath the earth and the flowers and the grass, and I say ‘yes. I think the post office have got it right, Lawrence. Good luck to you. Wherever you are now.’

I joined Lesley, and then we both took our present places of residence back to the car and drove on…

 
As it happens, this is our third graveyard in two days. We had gone to see the 13^th Century church after leaving the Bates Motel. It was whilst we were there, that the suggestion to see where Lawrence was buried came up. The suggestion came from neither Lesley nor me but from the Reverend. He is the rector at the ancient church; a lovely man who was warm and welcoming and very knowledgeable about the history of the church itself. He was a large man, with big hands and big feet in nice brown shiny shoes. I had parked in his space outside the church in the narrow country lane, and we were about to enter the grounds. He came up the road in his car, and gesticulating, indicating that we were in his parking space. I got back into the car and moved it down the lane to a parking lot of gravel and sun baked dirt.

          When I got back to the church a couple of minutes later, Lesley was talking to him. He turned, having been introduced to me in my absence and said, ‘I’m very pleased to meet you.’ He shook my hand in a firm grip. ‘Do come in. Come. It’s such a wonderful church. Yes. Take as many pictures as you want.’ And he strode through the cemetery, past the gravestones and into the little arched entrance with us in his wake; forgive the pun.

          He was good enough to point out various features of the church such as where it had flooded years previously. There was a tide mark about six inches up on all the pews.

          ‘It was dreadful, you know. The old lady at No.42, Mrs Montague was swept away out of her rocking chair; right out of her living room and into the street. She’s eighty two you know, but only looks seventy three. Remarkable.’

          ‘Oh dear,’ said Lesley. ‘Was she…’

‘Oh no; the Lord was looking out for her on that day. She was in shock of course, with some cuts and bruises, but she was quite alright. She went back to knitting jumpers for the church raffle more or less straight away. She’s housebound you see. She said if the flood didn’t stop Noah it wasn’t going to stop her. Very admirable, don’t you think?'

‘Yes. I’m not sure I could stay so positive after having a flood flow through my living room and sweep me downstream.

‘Well,’ said the Reverend, a born optimist if ever there was one, ‘at least it got her out of the house for a few hours.’ He pointed up to the front of the little church to where a couple of old ladies were sitting, praying. ‘She’s up there now,’ he said ‘bless her. None the worse for being swept away by the floodwaters.’

‘How long was she in the water?’ I asked.

‘About ten minutes.’

I peered at her. I would have thought she was in the water a lot longer than that, because she was very, very wrinkled.

‘I guess that’s rather like life and death. There you are, amusing yourself as best you can, and then the river of life suddenly sweeps you away.’

‘With Jesus as the lifeguard’ I say, getting into the swing of it.

‘Lord no! That’s the Grim Reaper, standing on the banks of the river.’

‘Oh. So… he jumps in and saves you?’

The reverend laughs, ‘with that big black cloak and the heavy sickle? I don’t think so. He just stands there and you drown.’

‘Well, couldn’t he just, sort of, reach out with his sickle and pull you onto dry land?’ I ask.

The reverend frowns at that. ‘Interesting theory,’ he said. ‘I guess that would be an ecumenical matter, don’t you think? Anyway, let me show you a bit more of the church. Now this…’ he says pointing to the base of one of the supporting pillars, ‘…used to be the original holywater font. The builders, a few hundred years ago, used it as part of the foundation for the pillar. I believe it got a mention in the Telegraph, or was it The Times?’

Yes; we had builders like that in our old house, built circa 1839, I thought to myself. The lintel above our fireplace turned out to be supported by a Formica table; circa 1970.

The reverent clapped his hands together as a sudden thought came to him, ‘Ohhhh, you really must see this.’ He led us a little way along to a plaque on the wall written in Olde English. It was a dedication to the wife of somebody or the other. ‘Now, read that and tell me what you think it means. I’ll be back in a moment.’ The reverend went off to talk to three of his parishioners, combined age of about 297.

Lesley and I read it, and whereas I didn’t quite understand it, Lesley got what it mean straightaway. It was a dedication from a man to his late wife, which basically said, one of the things he missed was her passion in the conjugal department.

The Reverent returned and said, ‘well? What do you make of it?’

Lesley wasn’t too sure how far to go with the explanation. He was after all a Reverend.

‘I think it means he misses the…um… warmth of his wife.’

‘You’ve got it,’ he said, delighted and then chuckled, ‘he’s saying, quite frankly, that she was rather marvellous in bed. Very passionate, what? Ha ha ha ha ha! I think it’s absolutely wonderful’.

It was not long after this that the reverend, who in our opinion was rather wonderful, in a very enthusiastic, overgrown public schoolboy way himself, recommended that we go to see where Lawrence of Arabia was buried.

We thanked him and left a fiver in the collection box and had a look around the graveyard before we went. The gravestones were very, very old, and rather tasty to the lichen that was slowly eating its way through them over the centuries. With a lot of them, not even the delicate touch of your fingers could discern the names, weathered away and forgotten. One sarcophagus was so old, a tree had started to grow through it, pushing away the rock, like a wooden Jesus, resurrected and coming out to see, just what on earth was the reverend laughing at?

Click to make bigger

I felt somehow reluctant to go. I really took a shine to the big man of the cloth, with the easy manner and infectious enthusiasm for life amidst all of this death. He seemed to me, to be one of the old school of Englishmen, the type that had been in the far flung corners of the Empire flying the flag with tea and cucumber sandwiches, followed by cricket and a quick charge of the Light Brigade before changing for dinner.

( Later on that day......)

Let’s go for a walk, I said. Here we are a few hours later parked in the countryside at a beauty spot. We got out of the car, and I rummaged around for my notebook. ‘Go on ahead,’ I said to Lesley, as I looked for it. She did, disappearing out of sight down the country lane. I rummaged and poked around the bags, and lifted things up and out and couldn’t find the bloody notebook anywhere. So, I decided to take my laptop. To me it seemed like a good idea, but when I caught up with Lesley I began to have second thoughts.

          ‘What on earth are you doing?’ she asked, looking at the laptop, wedged under my arm. I don’t have a case for it and it was quite plain to see.

          ‘I couldn’t find my notebook so I thought I’d bring this instead.’

          She thought it was hilarious. ‘We’re going for a nice walk in the countryside. Everybody has got hiking boots on and rucksacks and you’re carrying a laptop. You look like a lunatic.’

          ‘But… what if I get a good idea?’ I said, rather miffed and feeling like a bit of a tit.

          Lesley couldn’t reply for laughing. I felt like the cows were mooing derisively at me. ‘You know,’ she said,’ the longer I live with you, the more I realise, you’re not the full shilling. We’ll only be half an hour or so. If you get an idea now, surely you’ll remember it by the time we get back to the car.’

          ‘Eh… true, but I might want to capture the moment,’ I said, defensively.

          ‘I suppose if you were a caveman, you’d be walking around with a chisel in one hand, and a rock in the other. Hammering out a few notes as you went along.’ She broke up laughing again and couldn’t speak for a minute. When she got her breath back she said, ‘can’t you go anywhere without your toys? Have you thought about enjoying the moment by… enjoying the moment? Can’t the notes wait until after you’ve had the moment instead of during the moment itself?’

          ‘Well… no,’ I said, ‘and anyway, writing abut something doesn’t stop me from enjoying the moment. And how else am I supposed to capture the moment if I don’t write about it there and then?’

          She held up the camera and raised her eyebrows.

          I didn’t enjoy the moment.

 
We needed some place to spend the night. It was late and we were tired, some place between Southampton and someplace else. I can’t remember. I pulled into the car park of a Travel Lodge and Lesley went inside to enquire about a room. I sat in the car and ate a banana.

She came back out and said, ‘we’re in luck. They’ve just had a cancellation.’

‘Oh great!,’ I said, ‘is it a double?’

‘Yes. The girl on reception said it’s a disabled room, and if we didn’t mind that, it’s ours for the night.’

‘A disabled room? You mean the television doesn’t work?’ I asked, momentarily confused.

‘No. I mean it’s a room for people with a disability.’

‘Oh. I get it. But… we’re not disabled. Are you sure they’ll let us have it?’

‘Don’t worry,’ Lesley said, gathering her stuff, ‘if there’s any problem, just show then your laptop and tell them you bring it for walks in the countryside. Mental disability will do just fine…’

 
Oh dear; more dead people, and another legendary figure; Lord Horatio Nelson. He died, as you probably know, at the battle of Trafalgar. Lesley and I are avid readers of the Patrick O’Brien novels, set in the Napoleonic era, not long after the death of Nelson. The two main characters, Captain Jack Aubrey, and his particular friend, Stephen Maturin, sail the seas on ships much like the one Nelson served on, the HMS Victory. We took the time to go to Portsmouth where it is in dry dock and I have to say, never in life have we been so enchanted.

          Approaching the ship, with its intricate symmetry of rigging and spars against the sky, with its sleek lines and huge presence in the heart of the collective memory of Britain, I was so excited I wanted to run to it and shout ‘hurrah!’ as if it were back from a long voyage. It was truly the most beautiful manmade thing I have ever set eyes upon. From the rigging, there were little signal flags flying. They gave the same message that was hauled aloft before the battle.

           England expects every man to do his duty

The Victory is a three decker, meaning three decks of guns. You could see the top two rows of gun ports were open, and the guns had been run out. The lower gun ports were closed. The weight of metal that all three decks could, and did, throw at an enemy ship was devastating; the equivalent of taking a wrecking ball from a crane and smashing through a forest with it. The amount of gunpowder on board, if ignited, would cause devastation for a couple of miles. The HMS Victory, for all its beauty, was the ultimate in the art of bludgeoning an enemy vessel to death in a fury of noise and blast and cannon balls and grapeshot, ripping and decapitation, from the mouths of 100 black mouthed guns, rippling from it in gouts of flame and smoke. Yet, as I say, we were both struck by the beauty of it.

We walked around the starboard side, to the stern of the ship; passing beneath the three layers of windows where Admiral Nelson had his quarters, and also that of Captain Hardy. You could not help but imagine the pale face of the diminutive admiral, staring out of one of the windows, across the grey waves of the Atlantic on those last fateful days before his death, having written his will to Lady Hamilton, his mistress back in Blighty.

After the battle had subsided, as the voices of English sailors died down around the fleet having cheered themselves hoarse in triumph and joy in survival; after utterly crushing the French and Spanish fleets; having somehow survived the maelstrom of fire and blood and stupefying noise, their ears still ringing, some now deaf from the unearthly, inhuman din of battle, some of the sailors noticed that the lanterns in Nelson's cabin failed to come on as dusk inexorably pulled the shroud of night over the scenes of carnage. This was the first indication they had that Nelson had not survived the battle. Men wept. Nelson was a hero to the nation, but much more so to the sailors themselves; though saying that, the barrel of brandy that his body was preserved in had to be placed under guard, as a mark of respect, certainly, but also to make sure none of the thirsty sailors had a wee dram from the cask.

We walked up the gangplank on the larboard side, and stooped to enter the dim light of the Victory's lower decks. Lesley and I looked at each other in delight but also a peculiar reverence. This was no temple or place of the sacred. There was much more, one suspects of the profanity of the mundane and the masculine world of the common man down here; but we did feel a certain reverence. Perhaps ancestor worship is innate in all of us and to step into a space were you enter their world is somewhat thrilling, and yet at the same time unnerving. You can almost hear the hard slap of bare feet on the wooden deck, the hard soles of the sailors as they run along the deck.

For a few moments we stood, imbibing the atmosphere of the eighteenth century. The light was spilling into the gloom from the open gun ports and the smell of tar on rope was in our nostrils. Looking down the length of the deck, it was apparent how small the crew were, compared to the average height today. I had to stoop to stop myself from bashing my head as we made our way along the deck, passing 32 pounder guns to our right. It actually looked quite spacious, as we made our way along, which it was; but that’s because the crew were long gone. Some of them possibly,now residing  in the graveyards we had visited over the past couple of days. If so, even though the names were weathered away, the presence of so many men, 821, living, working and fighting on the HMS Victory, was still all around us.

          There was so much to take in, the mind was almost numbed by it. There was so much of their world to take in and so little of our own in sight, you half expected to hear the ship's bell ringing; or to see a face peering up at you as you descended the steep ladder to go down to the deck below.

          Thick ropes, bigger than the width of both my arms together, were coiled neatly in the middle of the decks. Boxes of cutlasses and muskets, fire buckets, heavy with sand, and wooden bowls on the mess tables with a piece of hard tack, waiting for a sailor to fill a long empty seat.

We made our way on and up, to the main deck, to the base of the immense masts that towered above us; on either side the rigging, like the web of a spider with a particularly bad case of obsessive compulsive disorder. How must it have been to feel the sea spray on your face, and the ship riding the waves with the weather gauge? The taut crack of the canvas and the slow easy groan of the ship beneath your feet as it rose and fell. Imagine the flat slap of bare feet on the deck as the hands are mustered; the rolling vowels of the men as they speak, going about their work, and the grey sea about you, cold and seemingly endless. We stand near the foremast, and look toward the stern of the ship, to the quarterdeck. There stands the admiral, a slight figure, looking even smaller with his black hat worn athwart his head. With him lie the hopes of England, that the French fleet will be smashed, and the threat of Napoleon  crossing the Channel with his army will be no more.

A child runs across the deck and breaks the spell. I follow Lesley toward the light under the quarterdeck, which comes from the window of Nelson's great cabin. In wonder we walk past the large wooden wheel with its many heavy wooden spokes of dark wood. They look polished and I wonder if that is from the fastidiousness of the navy, or is it worn to a shine by the hands of the men who steered the ship through the years? I only hold that query for a moment. Knowing something of the navy, it will have been polished.

On we go through a small dark passageway, and into the great cabin. It runs the width of the ship and the light from the small paned windows is considerable; enough to read a map; enough to write a letter to Lady Hamilton. Here, Nelson entertained his captains. The table itself is before us, but not laid for a banquet. You can virtually hear the conversations and the laughter. The smell of figgy dowdy, the fruity warm scent of claret, the glint and chink of glasses raised in a toast as the wake of the ship trails behind, a white wash of ocean upon the waves, and through those windows, the sight of dozens of ships of the line, canvas aloft and full, sailing toward the enemy.

Continuing through to the left and reversing direction back toward the bow of the ship, we pass through the darkened space where Nelson slept. His hammock is up, and his nightshirt placed across it. The fact that he wasn’t a tall man is brought home by the size o f the place where he slept. It reminds me of the gently rocking cot of a child. Did he lie awake in here, listening to the sound of the ship in motion, and the men, with the greasy wicker smell of the lamps he had just extinguished? Did he feel his heart beating and listen to his breath and think of the fragility of his own life, how slender was the cord that kept him from death?

We move along, past the cabin of the ship's secretary, John Scott,  who was cut in two as he stood by Nelson on the quarterdeck during the battle, shortly before Nelson himself was mortally wounded.

         
There was so much to see on the ship, from the galley to the gun decks to the uniforms worn by the ship's complement of marines, to the drums that were used to beat to quarters. It was like lying on your back and having the 18^th century poured, unchecked into your eyes. On one hand, it was an exquisitely enchanted little world of the past brought to life, but at the same time it was a sad and somewhat lonely echo from the past. Where have they all gone, I ask myself? Where has the man who ate from the wooden bowl gone? Where has the man who drank from the mug, carved from whalebone? Where is the man whose hand ran along the rail as he descended the ladder into the gloom? Where is the man who saw his reflection in the ship's bell as he polished it?

          All gone.

          Curiously, as we descend down to the cable tier, the ship is rocking, as if at sea. I dismiss the sensation, even though I totter ungainly on occasion. The ship is in dry dock. Steady as a rock. And yet the sensation grows.

          Lesley suddenly puts a hand on my arm and says, ‘can you feel that?’

          ‘Feel what?’ I ask

          ‘The ship,’ she says, ‘it's rocking.

          ‘I’m glad you can feel it too,’ I reply, ‘I thought it was just me.’

          So what caused the sensation of motion? Who knows? In the gloom of the orlop deck we walked, careful of our balance, feeling there was movement all around us, from the ship and from something else; people. Lesley keeps getting the sensation that someone is behind her and wants to move past but there is nobody there when she looks over her shoulder. Lesley is rather psychic, to say the least. I too, have my moments. I have seen ghosts. In fact the last one I saw was hanging from a rafter at the end of my bed in a rather grubby old flat I once lived in, suspended by the neck. I summoned up an incantation which is often quite effective in removing an unwanted presence. You didn't know I was a bit of a magician too, did you? Rather irritably, not being in the mood for a random apparition, I said, ‘oh…look, just fuck right off!’ It did.

For the most part, the supernatural, as in apparitions, are rather boring when you get down to it. Let’s face it, it's usually just a repeat of a moment in time, and who wants to spend their time watching a rerun? People say it’s an unhappy soul; they can fuck off too. If I leave my shirt behind on a beach and the wind blows it up and along, does that mean my shirt is unhappy? No; whatever it is that animates a ghost, it isn’t the soul; after death the soul has better things to do than rattle the odd doorknob or provide a tourist attraction in some castle. A ghost is a footprint in the sands of time, if you want to be poetic about it. Sure, that isn’t a scientific explanation, but most scientists are only people who have studied longer than you and I, to become specifically ignorant in a particular field, rather than generally ignorant like the rest of us.

Not that I’m against science, or scientists; without them I wouldn’t be standing before the place where Nelson died, able to take a picture with my camera. Many people think he died above, on the quarterdeck when he was hit by a musket ball. He didn’t. He died down here, in the half light of the orlop deck, bathed by the light of a lantern, surrounded by the gloom and hustle of shadows from the figures around him. There is an oil painting of the scene down here, which reminds me of the nativity scene, but in reverse.  In one, a soul enters the fray of human existence, in the other, a soul departs…

       And now having travelled through the late afternoon and gathering dusk here we are, back at the Tor in Glastonbury, back where we started. This time the sky is black and stars shine like the souls of all the dead we have passed over these past few days. The Tor is silhouetted against the sky, and there are lights, slowly coming down, a snake of illumination slowly wending its way down and around toward us. Voices murmur and burble; an incomprehensible incantation of the voices of children. In years past, perhaps it would have been the work of druids, or occultists, but tonight a party of school children have been up there with their teachers.

          I stand behind Lesley, my arms wrapped around her like a cloak as we stare up at one of the most ancient and enigmatic spiritual centres of England.

          We stand at the gate to the field that leads to the path that takes you up the Tor. Behind us, a voice of a young woman, French and carrying a big rucksack.

          ‘Do you know if we can camp in this field?’ she asks.

          ‘I would think so,’ Lesley replies.’ Just tuck yourself away. I’m sure nobody would mind.’

          ‘Tres bien,’ she says. Another camper, her compatriot comes up and points up at the lights.

          ‘What is this?’ he asks. We tell him and he says, ‘great. What a way to learn. Lessons with a little bit of scariness thrown in.’

          I was in a Christian Brother's school; now, that was scary.

We get into the car and soon the children and their teachers pass by. Lesley says, out the window, ‘not left any behind have you?’

          A weary voice out of the darkness replies, ‘I hope so…’

          The children, faces illuminated now and then by the torches they hold giggle; some bravado in the dark from the boys; giggles from the girls and sensible remarks about having good batteries in one's torch.

           It’s too dark to go up ourselves without the aid of a flashlight. The only way we could get up there in this darkness would be by Braille, running our fingers along the grass, and we would inevitably end up reading the words, ‘big steaming pile of cow dung.’ So, we sit in the car to await first light. Then we will make our ascent. Lesley gets into her sleeping bag. I write this on the laptop and we both drink tea until the night settles inside us and sleep wells up like a tear and we are gone.

 
Morning comes. Lesley is awake, looking out of  the window at a robin, perched on the fence looking at her. Robins turn up in Lesley life at special moments, so it was nice to see this one. I scrambled for my camera but it flew away. Is nature always trying to tell us something? Are we always looking for an answer? Who knows?

We have a drink of tepid tea, which is all that is left in the flask, wrap up and then head up the Tor. The walk takes us up large stone steps which amble, steeply up the hill. The tower at the top draws our eyes to it like a magnet, growing larger as we approach, until we reach the top and stand at the base of it, having to crane our necks to look up to the top of it, to the blue sky. The faded face of a saint on the wall above the archway looks down. It’s a special moment, a spiritual dawn, the wind fresh and awakening on our skin.

          And then some scruffy git in a hood starts singing a very bad song around the other side of the tower. I break the moment for myself by wanting to take the guitar and throw it down the hill, followed by him.

          ‘Oh, for fuck sake,’ I say. What an inconsiderate bastard. No matter what the form of worship, if it involves a guitar or a tambourine, lets face it, you may as well drop all the pseudo-spiritual leanings here and now because you’re going to burn. At least, I hope so. The troubadour was sitting facing the rising sun, strumming away. Lesley was pressed up against the wall, for a moment reminding me of a convict trying to escape the accusatory glare of a searchlight. She looked dismayed. I was caught myself between thinking it was too much of a hippie cliché to be annoyed with it, and then I would veer back toward being really annoyed at some arse being up here singing a bad hippie song; self composed I presume; nobody would sing anything like that unless they wrote it themselves; much like the smell of your own body rarely offends you after a couple of weeks without washing, whilst even flies are spraying air freshener and complaining that you’re putting them off their food.

          There was another guy who I presumed was with the idiot, though I was surprised, because this one looked like he washed. I was going through the scenario of me saying, ‘excuse me, but would you mind shutting the fuck up?’, when Lesley decided to go down the hill, away from the tower, to where we had passed a wooden bench on the way up. This annoyed me immensely because I hate to see inconsiderate people getting their way, and the tit of a troubadour was certainly getting his; and besides, I realised that Lesley also had the bloody lighter. I was also quite sure he would shut up in a minute now that there were other people present, and if not, he wouldn’t be able to sing with the guitar lodged in his windpipe.

I went around to the other side of the tower and called Lesley a few times but she couldn’t hear me over the sound of the wind. Sighing, and feeling very grumpy I went down to join her, just as the would be Bob Dylan came to the end of his rendition of passing a rather large stool, and by that I mean one with three legs and made of oak.

It was rather a good job I did follow her. I joined her on the bench and we could see, down in the field where some tents were pitched, a man walking his dog. He went to each tent and said something to the occupants. Then he started coming up the hill. He was an old man, with three labradors that were even older than he was, by the look of them. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had their own bus passes and pension books buried with their bones someplace. We had been worried about somebody coming along and giving us a parking ticket, and as it turned out, the old man confirmed this was the case. The police regularly came along and slapped fines on the cars that parked up here. The last thing we needed was that. Our financial state was already a little precarious and I had just been made redundant a few days beforehand.

So, thanking him for the warning, we went down the hill and parked a little way away, with the Tor still in sight. It had been something of an anticlimax. We had been expecting to have something of a spiritual moment of stillness; a little revelation in the dawn light as the night drew back and revealed the colours of the morning, but no; instead, we got a hippie with a guitar and the strong possibility of a parking fine for £65; bad car karma.

 I know there are always lessons to learn. Like the path up the Tor, it’s an uphill one; dear God please let there be no hippie with a guitar at the end of mine. If I see Jesus with a tambourine, I’m going to Hell on the next available death. I know, I was being intolerant of another human being. I expect the guy with the guitar was far more devout than I. He may have even written his songs as a prayer to the Divine Mother and all her Creation; he may be closer to the Father than I am, and I’d be surprised if he isn’t; I am temptation's harbour, after all, and sin comes here to rest. I expect he has faith and is singing out of a desire to share it with the grass and the rocks and the poor bastards who have slept overnight in a cramped car so they could climb the hill at the crack of dawn. I really shouldn’t be so scathing. I really shouldn’t. I reveal my heathen qualities and my inability to go with the flow of the Divine plan for all creatures; but, fuck it, once more, that’s just where I’m up to. I don’t so much have faith as an amorphous sense of direction; a spiritual compass with a spinning needle which leaves me feeling lost, wondering how the heart approaches what it yearns, which is truth, purity, compassion, love and peace.

Mind you, maybe the needle spins because what I seek is everywhere…

Yes.

I think that may very well be the case.

And now, I really do think it’s time to go home…

Peace

Lesley & Geetan

Epilogue:  With hindsight we both had a chuckle when we realised that we'd been confronted with the Green Man at the top of Glastonbury Tor!