Towersey

Towersey Village Festival is a charming little festival set on two fields near Thame in Oxforshire. It was sunny/rainy and dark/bright weather in a most confusing way all weekend.... literally, patches of rain overlapping the sunshine in the most mixed up way. We made lanterns out of withy and tissue paper and glue with a little candle inside, for the procession. The long whippy, bendy, fine sticks communicated circular or loopy shapes, so I based my lantern on the standard contruction shown to us, but with curves in the shape. It was far more difficult than I imagined but it looked pretty in the end!

I bought a hundred glow sticks from ebay and sold them until they were paid for, then gave them out to all and sundry. When you bend and crack a glow stick to activate the glow, the initial resulting part mixture of the chemicals inside gives off a sudden swirly, reactive glow that cannot be captured. Just like a glow stick in it's first moment, the exact atmosphere of sun on grass and gentle folk music, and drifting in and out of hand knitted rainbow moods at good festivals cannot be captured :)

How to De-Junk Your Life. Not.

Note the position of the "How to De-Junk Your Life" book, here on my specialised Filing-Bed (TM) late at night. Funniest thing is? Last week I lost that book under a pile of papers. Boy do I need it.

Total Ebay sublime PURPLE joy no P&P! must see!

After today, which was mostly cancelled, I found myself answering email after email; "Item Sold", "Instant payment recieved" "question for Ebay item 1039812982348762365423646" I never thought I'd reach out so far. That things I've made now belong to people in Truro and America and Rochester (!!!) Someone in Bodmin bought my Bone!
Someone called James Potter bought something too......he's alive! :)

I put a painting on there for £20. And someone bought it. Another artist actually bought it becasue she was inspired by it. And then she emailed me to say how inspired she was. Amazing. I'm amazed. I cried (I'm SO soft) when she sent me her email. All written in Comic sans font, 16pt, bold, purple, telling me how much she liked my purple painting.

After that I was inspired to take pictures of all sorts of things!!! And after a while I had to put my little camera down because it was overheating. What a metaphor. What a website! what a phenomena. Plastic gecko, anyone?

Funerals

Aren't lilies odd? like a set of little dusty saffron canoes, upside down on spraying fountains inside a knickerbocker-glory glass.

It's a pity my Grandpa wasn't alive to see his funeral, he would've loved the pomp and circumstance aspect of it. It was a Roman Catholic affair, lots of "smells and bells" as my neighbour puts it. Clouds of incense were shaken, and holy water from a bizarre brass phallus, was flicked over the coffin, which was covered in a white pall, washed three times by my Mother of course because it wasn't clean. I couldn't help thinking of his stash of magazines as I watched, and about his various habits as I listened to the priest talking about the purification of the spirit.

He really wanted to die, in fact he wanted to die three years ago when my Grandma died, because he'd lost his cook and housekeeper and the person who remembered all the birthdays and kept in touch with all the friends.

There was no eulogy because no one wanted to write one. Sadly for him I suppose, no-one really liked him particularly, not even his family, so the priest (who knew him quite well) said a few words. He managed to get across the image of a grumpy, hard to help, passionless old git with a sweet little old man trapped inside (at least we think there was something nice trapped inside) quite nicely. Priests clearly have hidden skills. Hordes of people, familiar and unfamiliar then proceeded to descend on the house to scoff the food we'd slaved over and presumably to inspect the carpets, because my mother had violently hoovered them to the threads over and over again.

It seems best that he's gone and I suppose I feel vaguely guilty that I can't think of a single thing I'll miss about him at all.

fluff

It took me a while, but I have found some fluff to list on ebay. I found it under my chair. You may scoff at the idea of selling fluff, but I just sold a plastic gecko! The listing said "Plastic Gecko; He will be your Friend". Someone needed him more than me. Aw. I'm not sure I can sell fluff on the premise that it will become friendly though. Perhaps I ought to list it under "home improvement" for making one's new house seem more lived in. Hmmm.

ebay excitement

I have an ebay shop! wow! It has nothing in it yet though. Which reminds me of the dozens of unfinished projects lying about my workshop and indeed, my head. Nothing in there but fluff. Perhaps I will photograph and list some fluff. I have spent most of an unexpectedly tiring day avoiding real work by photographing, cataloguing and listing things on ebay. My listings are mostly bizarre, from the subline to the ridiculous, literally, from plastic geckos and yellow die, to fat leafy necklaces and "vintage" crystals. How I HATE the word "Boho".

Psychic Fayre

It was in a small church hall type place in Essex on a rainy day that there was Reiki in one corner, and spiritual healing in another corner and there were push chairs, and an abundance of little children saying "Look Mummy, another Buddha". There were tables groaning under the weight of pewter fairies covered in glitter and resin castings of wizards and witches and row upon row of dreamcatchers. Everyone was miserable and even the healers held packets of fags behind their backs with their ordinary, often empty, wallets. There was a table covered in sad little paper plated portions of squashed SunBlest sandwiches with Bernard Matthew translucent ham and a slice of swiss roll under cling film.

I've never seen so many overweight women wearing huge pastel Tshirts with pictures of winsome fairies on them. People thumbing furiously through crystal healing tomes in search of mystical cures that supposedly lie in pieces of rock as lumpy as themselves. There was a woman on one table who, for £10, would draw your spirit guide. Each person's spirit guide looked oddly similar, flattish, with tiny eyes in the style of a budding GCSE level artist drawing her friend's faces on the cover of an exercise book. The woman herself had sparkling eyes but she never smiled. There was a woman all in purple pyramid-selling anti ageing skin cream and cures for M.E. with carefully laminated "before" and "after" photographs. Almost everyone was all in purple, and all the tablecloths were purple, including mine whose previously "unusual" dusty lilac velvet paled next to the screaming purples around it.

I was there to sell jewellery, and not much in the way of jewellery sales happened but I did have to listen to a lot of people with upsettingly vague ideas. I came away with an impression of a group of people clutching at straws, desperate to believe in something Other, rejected by mainstream religion and medicine, on the edges, and I couldn't understand a single one of them.

unsafe festivals and broken ankles

I can't believe what's happened to My Sidmouth.

http://www.sidmouthfolkweek.co.uk/

I've been going to the festival since I was 18, stewarding often, and I've never seen it like this. It's a massive festival in it's infancy, a strange and difficult thing to have to run, but I really don't think it's rocket science to print out a few passes in advance, or to write a stewarding training manual. It was only ever a few paragraphs long anyway. Thing is, I'm not at all sure that next year will be any different, and I suppose what I want to ask myself is... do I really want to be involved in such a complete mess?

This me and Cath. She broke her ankle on the first night and I had my first ever ride in an ambulance with her to Exeter hospital. An Heroic Adventure for me and a rather large shock for her. Here she is with her new flouro pink cast on!