I Love The Festival!

It didn't really feel as if it had started until this afternoon. Then I got the bike out and cycled down to the Festival site. I met Tracy on the way - she was going to the Phil Rickman and Barbara Erskine talk too, and like me she'd decided to go down early to have a look around.
The first thing I wanted to look at was the Transition Towns garden, just by the front entrance, which I saw as I went to park my bike. They've fenced the area with hazel, and put up a little gateway/lychgate leading to a bark path and a little bridge over what used to be a pond, but is now dry. They've put plants in, and Goffee has done a willow sculpture of five figures standing on their hands while each is reading a book. It looks wonderful.
There are bronzes scattered around the Festival site, of people sitting and reading. There was also a bumble bee - or at least, a girl dressed up as a bumble bee, with what looked like quite a heavy backpack. She was giving out samples of Honeydew real ale (which is also organic).
Phil Rickman and Barbara Erskine were in one of the smaller tents, and they started off with a brief run down of why Glastonbury is such a special place. Quite co-incidentally, they have both just written a book set in and around Glastonbury. Phil Rickman's concerns Dr John Dee and a search for the bones of King Arthur, and he read an extract which leads up to Dr Dee losing his virginity! He introduced this extract with an email. He had talked to someone in Glastonbury about John Dee's love life, and getting the impression that he was something of a late starter in that area - and the chap went off with a pendulum to the house where John Dee used to live (or the remains of it) to ask him about it! A week later, Phil Rickman got an email from Dr John Dee himself, which mentioned an embarrassing incident while he was a student in Cambridge that put him off sex for years! (For those who don't know, the good doctor lived at the time of Elizabeth I).
Barbara Erskine's book also starts in Cambridge, with a woman curate who is also psychic and struggling to come to terms with it - so her bishop sends her off to Glastonbury! One of them said later that she should have talked to Merrily Watkins about it, Phil Rickman's series character who is a woman priest and diocesan exorcist for Herefordshire. Phil said "I'd have said yes (if Barbara had asked him to use her)." Part of Barbara Erskine's story also involves Jesus who, legend has it, went to Glastonbury as a young man with his uncle Joseph of Arimathea. She said that writing that part actually changed her spiritual views, having to think of Jesus as a real young man - "a sort of gap year student", as she described him.

Back home, I arrived just in time to see our new town cryer, in full rig-out, locked out of the house where he lives and ringing his bell to try and summon someone to let him in!
Walking up a little way, I found the plant lady who has a stall outside Monicas. She was outside herbfarmacy, with her chap, and they were building a little enclosure around the slate monolith that's just been put up there, and filling it with plants. "People have been saying it's a bit phallic, so we thought we'd better soften it up a little," Carol (the herbfarmacy lady) said. We were joined by Mary from across the road, who had just been up to the Globe to see the exhibition there - the artist was her mother's second cousin.
On round the corner to find that the exhibit on the sculpture trail has been installed on the Library Green, a wooden garden seat with cruck built shelter, very solid looking, with lovely wide boards.
Round the corner again, and the doors to the back of Booths were open, with people spilling out onto the pavement. At the very last minute the carpenters' workshop has been transformed into exhibition space for the Hereford students who took photos around town in February. The pictures have been beautifully framed up, and the first person I met was Adam, the photographer who took my photo with Islay, with his girlfriend. Islay was in her element here - she went off to meet and greet while I looked at the photos. I saw her having her photo taken again, and getting lots of fuss, and one chap said it was about time she got herself an agent!
So it's been a wonderful evening, and most of it was serendipity.