The Ned Wood Archive

Joe

More or less every place he goes, he’s told the same thing.  On the sides and doors of the long drops.  Inside and out.  On the fences guarding the hedges.  At the entrance to the Green Fields and over by Greenpeace.  Pinned up in the Tiny Tree Tent and the stall selling veggie meals.  Someone has been busy all night.  The same A4 poster stuck everywhere.  Listing not just their gigs at Toad Hall and Small World, but their appearances at pretty much every other festival, gathering, and protest over the coming summer and into the autumn.  Bold, Beautiful, Frontline Folk, it announces.  Music for our common future, it tells him.  Seize the Day it says. Radical English acoustic folk band, Seize the Day. All over Glastonbury.

Yeah, well.  He’s already decided to do just that.  Seize the Day. Like the man says, I listen to the band –  they said that it could be the 2 of us.  Let’s stay together.  Let’s stay, these days are ours.  In the June rain, God only knows it’s hard to say goodbye.  Well, I’ll love you till July.  He just needs a chance.

And what a day it is to seize. The happy sun is bouncing up and down like that puppy at your Mom and Dad’s does whenever you go home. Gentle and warm not hot and brutal like it will be later in the day. The fields are glossy green and look as new as a spring day as a result of the litter pickers having been round.

Joe heard that phrase ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’ years before he heard the song. It means something different to him. The calm contented feeling you get after something good’s happened. The satisfied mind he always gets on the Sunday at Glastonbury. You’ve had two days of excellent gigs. The pressure to run around enjoying everything that sets in on Friday has long since disappeared. You’ve got the initial rush out of your system. Sunday you can just have fun.

So he starts with the predictable stuff.  The Greenpeace shower and the pastry breakfast.  He’ll retrace their steps from Friday morning in the hope that she maybe decides to do the same.  Then if that doesn’t work, he’ll start searching other places.  He’s got all day.  And he knows she’ll be at Bastille later that evening, so that’s his last resort.  

An hour or so later, he’s down in the Circus Field.  He’s had no luck yet, but the day’s young.  He rests on one of those seats outside the Glastonbury Free Press.  Maybe if he stays still for a few minutes, she’ll walk past.  You know that, if you stay still for long enough at Glastonbury, all the folk in the whole world will walk past.  At least all those folk who are worth knowing will.  But then, if you sit at the Red Tea Bus, which is more central, those folk worth knowing will walk past sooner.  He’s just about to get up and move down the track towards the tea bus when someone comes across and starts a conversation.

This happens a lot at Glastonbury.  Especially in Circus Field.  Especially on Sunday morning.  People will come up and start chatting to you more or less anytime, about anything, anyhow, anywhere along the way.  However, on a Sunday morning in Circus Field, they’ll come up to you and try and get you to join in some game or other.  So he does.  This woman, maybe his age, wants him and a few other folk coming down that Sunday morning to join in regardless or not of whether it takes them back to something that they’d lost somehow somewhere along the way.  

They all form in a circle, do a few exercises, then try to learn how to hula hoop.  So, she tells him, he has to get the right stance, feet apart, roughly in line with his shoulders, and keep those shoulders still.  And relax.  No, stand up straight.  Don’t hunch.  Give the hoop an initial spin then just rock backwards and forwards from the hips.  No, not sideways, backwards and forwards.  No, gentler.  Watch me.  What’s your name? OK, Joe, relax.  Get a rhythm going.  That’s it.  You’re getting the hang.

It’s hard work at first, but gradually it comes.  The more you think about it, the harder it is.  Focus on what she said.  Relax, Joe, relax.  To be honest, the skirt isn’t getting in the way, so he can’t blame that. He’d had fun wearing it the day before, so he thought why not? it’s gonna be hot again. Might as well. He’s had to move his bumbag, though. George’s bumbag. He’s wearing it like a sash over his shoulder not round his waist. Pretty soon, he can keep going for more than a few seconds.  And when he thinks he’s got the hang of it, she makes him go anticlockwise instead of clockwise.  Which for some reason is harder.  But he conquers that too.  Well, not so much conquers, but at least manages a tie.  It wears him out, but he’s done it at last.  He’s kept the hoop spinning round his waist.     

“Great, thanks,” he says.  “Can you teach us how to juggle?”

She has him throw a couple of balls in the air and catch them.  Then she says, “can you come back when you’ve got two weeks to spare?”