Rising from the Ashes

I’ve always liked the idea of festivals. Since a school friend absconded for a weekend for the Stonehenge free festival, returning with tales of body-painted hippies on acid, druids worshipping the sun, a peaceful gathering of alternative folk with no need for regulation or laws or police … deeply subversive for a military school … it seemed like hope had entered into an empty world.

Brimming with youthful enthusiasm, I went along in 1982 with my girlfriend. We hitch-hiked and arrived at 2 am, and blundering around in the dark tripping over camp fires and tripping bodies, we found a quiet place to pitch our tent.

The next day was scorching, and there was only 1 standpipe at the festival with a 1 hour queue, and we had arrived with an inadequate little camping bottle. Since the music was still a couple of days away, we hitched into Amesbury to get a bigger water container, only to find that the only hardware store had sold out days before.

That night we bedded down early and prayed for cooler weather. Then at 3 am a chapter of Hells Angels arrived, and decided the place we were camped was a perfect spot for some motorcycle repair. It wasn’t clear why their machines needed to be tuned to perfection before daybreak, but it *was* clear that we weren’t going to stop them. They weren’t aggressive. They just ignored us.

Ask an old hippy about Stonehenge, and they will always reminisce: “Amazing, no rules, no police, people just doing their thing and getting on together”. Ask: “But what if there was trouble?”, and they will reply: “Oh, if there was any trouble, the Hells Angels sorted it out”.

The next day, I got to witness the Hells Angels sorting out some trouble for myself. Some shyster had been selling sugar pills as “Sulphate” (Amphetamine sulphate) and a fight started. The little group of motorcycle enthusiasts around our tent got involved. The poor sod was dragged to the little enclave of motorbikes, half stripped, beaten, had his hands tied together, was tied by his wrists to the back of a motorbike, and was dragged around the festival site.

The police may be thugs, may beat people up, and occasionally kill somebody. But I still think they’re far preferable to the Hells Angels.

It was another scorching day, and we were getting dehydrated, so we left and hitched up North. When we got home I had bad heat stroke, and some horrendous bug I’d picked up which didn’t clear out of my system for another 3 years.

I’ve tried festivals since – more sedate affairs like Womad and Wood festivals, but there’s still the plague of drummers who play all night and then sleep all day. And the ever-present risk of heat-stroke. One Womad I spent two days lying in the river Thames to keep cool instead of enjoying the music.

I persevered even after having children. Another Womad I spent an entire day at the helter-skelter with my 4 year old. I passed one entire Wood festival in the childrens’ activity tent … desperate to listen to the great music just across the field. Intensely frustrating.

Last Saturday, failing to learn from years of repeated disappointment, I took the children to a tiny local child-friendly festival. I’ve been there before, and I remember abandoning the festival for the playground opposite, but I thought: “Well, the children are older now …”

It’s cheap – £1.50 per adult, children free. Lovely food available, made from vegetables grown on the allotments there. So, feed the children, and then chill out to some music.

Ha ha. Pizza for 3 plus a bit of candy floss came to £25. We had a stroll round the kids’ activities, but it was all “Nooo, we did that last year”, and then it rained. As we left we passed the stage where a jolly band was playing, but the trumpet was excrutiatingly out of tune. So glad to leave!

So, we went home and made another little experimental fire sculpture. 100 times more fun, a tenth of the cost :-)

The simple rope design was a collaboration by my kids. So sweet.

I was at a wedding last week. My own experience of marriage, back in 1983 aged just 20, made me realise the power of ritual. I wasn’t keen on the idea: for me, weddings should take place naked at Stonehenge at sunrise on a solstice, but as my fiancee pointed out, nobody would come along from our families … and probably few of our friends would have attended either!

It was financially convenient to get married, so I went along with the view that it’s “only a bit of hand-waving and singing” that needn’t really change anything.

I don’t remember much of the ceremony, apart from its rich beauty: we were married, by special dispensation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, in Trinity College chapel, Cambridge, where we were both undergraduates. (Since women had only been admitted for a few years, we were the first such couple). As it was the middle of the Summer break, the wedding party had the whole place to themselves.

I always felt like I’d ended up there by mistake: radically anti-establishment, anarchic and angry, parachuted into the heart of the establishment, due to my enthusiasm for equations and skills with a slide-rule. I didn’t fit in – by day, lecture theatres full of anorak-clad geeks, and by evening pissed dinner-jacket clad toffs without any trousers.

I am lucky to have two passions in life, and enough aptitude to pursue either of them at graduate level: science and art. But only one student grant. I nearly left Cambridge to pursue Fine Art (there’s no art dept. at Cambridge), but then I fell in love and decided to endure another two years of anoraks.

Back to the power of ritual. Neither myself nor my wife felt magically transformed by the wedding; but I soon realised that all witnesses to the ceremony, and their friends too, *had* been transformed. At first it was the little things: women friends ceased to flirt; single friends stopped calling round, while we started receiving surprise visits from couples; members of my family, who I had spent years avoiding, started taking an uncomfortably close interest in my affairs, as did my in-laws; landlords and university started having higher expectations of our behaviour. We were no longer just students. Now, we were *married* students.

Eventually, the combined expectations of two conservative families, a conservative university, a cluster of conservative self-appointed friends, and conservative employers and colleagues, brought the relationship to collapse. The chief expectation being that I would behave like a properly married Cambridge chap, work ridiculously long hours within the profit-sector, and earn immoral amounts of dosh. It was not to be, and when I left my wife and dropped out to join the Oxford Writers and Artists Co-operative on the dole in 1989, I broke many more hearts than my wife’s.

For years I found weddings almost unbearable. Watching innocent young people drawn into the minefield of implicit, unstated expectations, of which they were broadly unaware. Until I realised that most people seem to enjoy the life of meeting other peoples’ expectations, and I was just unusual in my single-minded pursuit of what I felt was a vocation. Then I started to enjoy weddings again.

So, last week’s wedding was a great party. The greatest joy being my children sat next to me, the only difficulty being their mother sat next to them. Someone remarked later how “grown up” to attend such an event together, given the circumstances. It didn’t feel grown up, it felt hopelessly mixed up and f****d up.

Another joy was that the couple had sent out luggage labels with the invitations, with the request that they be suitably decorated for the wishing tree. Last time I tried post-card art I tried something experimental, and wound up with an object that looked like it had crawled out of the land-fill bin on a wet day. So this time I did what I know I can do well. Lovely colours …

My last Blog, “Before Hindsight” opened in December 09 with some pictures of canvas with some orange stuff smeared on it, smouldering feebly.

18 months on, and dozens of experiments later, here at last is a working prototype of the ultimate vision. I intend this blog to document the development of these techniques into public or semi-public presentations.

I still have a bag of highly toxic carcinogenic stuff that looks like orange sherbert to dispose of. Are there any natural dye enthusiasts who would like some Potassium Dichromate to mess around with?

Before Hindsight closed on a positive note. However, within days my partner (and mother of our children) announced that she was “actively seeking a new relationship”, though apparently I was welcome to carry on “hanging out” with her.

I can’t say I was well-pleased with the offer. Such experimentation is fine when you’re in your 20s with no kids or other responsibilities; and even then, it seldom, if ever, works out well (from experience). But in one’s 40s, 15 years into raising children, a business, and ageing parents, it seems like a monumental mistake.

So much of the last 12 months, and all my spare energy, has been devoted to turning my office and studio space into a home for me and the kids, and getting the new routines and procedures in place for all the mundane things such as getting the kids to and from school, etc.

My studio space is now much reduced, though still usable. I have fold-away beds for the children, and my desk is on wheels so I can move it around as other activities demand. And I’ve installed flooring in the attic, and put up masses of shelving. And I’ve decorated – it’s really up-beat, lots of primary colour (surprise), and the kids love it. So do I.

I only see the kids half time, which is a constant heart-break.

However, on the glass-half-full front: I see the kids half time!! Many Dads barely see their children at all. I have studio space and outdoor performance space!! This is a massive improvement on 20 years ago. My spare time is my own!! I’m no longer being made to feel that my creative enterprises constitute neglect of my family. This is, truly, a huge relief.

I’m hoping the mood of this blog will be phoenix-like, fiery, forward-looking, fuelled by the new opportunities that my new situation brings. But it will inevitably also include some soul-searching, a few regrets, looking back and assimilating the ashes into works of beauty.

After all, that, for me, is what the greatest artists have done, and hopefully I can follow on in my own small way.

Is it “e” for empty, experiment, or a rope trying to disappear up its own arse? Timing of fuse lighting not what I intended, but this demonstrates that the method works.