Cumberlandia

 

Cumberlandia

On the way to Cumbria my mind wouldn't function properly. I was reeling, giddy with shock from the strategic viciousness of the message my husband had, minutes before my departure, sent on from my brother about mum or rather, falsehoods and misdirections about how obstructive and generally awful I was. It was all set down for a future purpose so there was no point replying.  Although it was directed at me, it wasn't really for me.

In a supermarket car park I walked across a zebra crossing in front of a car that only just stopped in time but it barely registered with me. I went to buy supplies, came out, and had forgotten lunch. I got lunch and forgot money. In the turmoil of my departure I had unusually forgotten so many things from my packing list. I felt only lightly connected to reality. 

I drifted around the edges of Cumberlandia, the folk music festival I had been led to from the Folk in the Forest event. Actually, after the barn session [Judging character] Teetering, Safe Space] I wasn't sure I was up to all of this British folk music stuff. I loved to listen and in the right circumstances, would have liked to participate, but those hadn't arrived yet.  One needs to feel secure, safe and I hadn't.

So if I hadn't intended to go to, how was I there? An apparently inconsequential, chance meeting in Kent tipped the balance.  I had been staying on a lovely, natural campsite at the end of July for 5 days of a 10 day camping stay with my boys. There was only one sink for hand washing, teeth brushing and wash up so it was decidedly rough and ready in that respect but the charm of the place made up for it.  There were outdoor showers in wooden cubicles with views of a cornfield.  There are cracks between the cubicles, hissed my startled seventeen year old. Look out at the other view! I replied. There was a treehouse, swings for the kids, butterflies, fairy lights around the shepherd huts and a communal firepit.  It was gorgeous.

It was the perfect place, you would think, to hear acoustic music, a guitar, some singing.  But there was nothing besides a guy who briefly sang unconsciously and well while doing the washing up.  

I guessed if this had been Argentina, things would have been different.  Apparently, they make a fire, open wine, sing, play at the drop of a hat. If they are not in the country, they do it, minus the fire, on city squares. Even in cities lacking as much trust as Buenos Aires they still have that connection to community and to song. 

On our last day, packing up, a little girl was sitting in the basket swing tootling away on a kind of piano you blow into.  She played all sorts of tunes, Edelweiss and I forget what else, all by ear and quite well.  It was delightful.  Her dad had been the singer. Her mum came to chat.  We got on to music.  I mentioned Folk in the Forest and said I was in two minds about Cumberlandia. Perhaps one thing leads to another, she said.  So that's what tipped the balance: a little girl on a plastic melodica and her mum.

I wished the firepit had been lit in the evenings, at Cumberlandia, which had been promised but it didn't materialise until the Sunday morning when I smelt some arid smoke.  I thought, more intuitively than rationally, that things could happen, for people like me, around a fire.

After Cumberlandia, I found the right conditions, for me, for a brief hour or so, with Beto, at Southward farm at the Enchanted Wilderness event only days after Cumberlandia.  If I hadn't gone to Cumberlandia, I wouldn't have gone on to Wilderness.  It wasn't around a fire, but in the kitchen, which is a similar thing. Singing with Beto and especially hearing him sing Quiscaloro, which is about making the most of opportunity, were the right circumstances or more right than I had found hitherto.   

Meanwhile, in Cumbria, I felt unable to sit through any one act so thank goodness, around the edges, people could come and go.  My attention wandered.  Normally sociable, striking up conversation easily, this wasn't now so much the case.  That said, one of the most interesting conversations of the weekend was on the West Cumbrian economy with a security guy by the marquee, another with a quiet, friendly woman I met in the Shack.  The next time we bumped into one another she was wearing twig antlers.  She turned out to be a reformed party animal turned shaman. The twigs seemed to represent it all perfectly.

I heard the end of one of the organiser, Dave's acapella group, but the songs for dancing or celtic folk rock though I stayed for most of it, held my focus only lightly even while I admired the easy happiness of the dancers.  They were in another world I gazed in at, as from outside.

I felt most at ease only in the Shack, a place where musicians struck up tunes in extraordinary, impromptu harmony: whistle, accordeon, fiddles. There were people who sang and played well and wanted an audience but the real musicians seemed to be those who just found one another and suddenly, mysteriously, made a magic of vine-like, entwining, improvised sound, personality, ego, subsumed in rhythm and refrain.  Those melodic harmonies conjured from thin air are always, and were, particularly there, moments of pure enchantment.   

There, I sat entranced listening to Guy sing an original piece with heartfelt intensity.  He always held back, I noticed, was the last one, waited for everyone else first, had to be asked to sing.  He sang well and had an unusual playing style, almost as though he caressed the guitar. Those songs reminded me of the bagualas, vidalas and tonadas that accompany all aspects of traditional life in north western Argentina.  Music like that isn't entertainment - which is fine, but it conveys something else, something entirely different.  It is of a different order and it is not for everyone. There is music for performance, music for community, music whose main purpose is to express your feelings, to accompany what you see and do in life and how you feel about these. Sometimes they overlap. 

Cumberlandia, though it was lovely, felt more for other people, locals, couples, groups, people who knew each other than for unknown solos, particularly those in my state of mind just then, but the same can be said of many social events.  At smaller events the hosting goes a long way towards including solos so Folk in the Forest  was, in itself, a better event in itself, for me. 

Attendees were a mix of ages, with many, perhaps most over 40.  There as a nod to environmentalism in the sense that it was outside, in a pretty, natural site.  People turned up in alternative clothes.  Women in boots and dresses and wool cardis, wraps or long coats seemed to be one of the main looks.  I think I had joggers a fleece and a rain mac. It felt carefully curated that way but that's how people combine being creative and wanting to fit in. Some men had eco labels and rugged trousers. There were willow basket bags and hand knitted jumpers but none of it struck me as particularly "green". The few compost toilets were minging with no sawdust to add.  There were plenty of portaloos and standing cold water taps here and there. I hadn't realised there would be no showers, or hot water (admittedly, extreme-green) so not having washed since Thursday, on Saturday I went to use the facilities at the local pool.  

There was an overlap of people between Folk in the Forest and Cumberlandia.  The ethos I had picked up on at Whinlatter seemed to be in part about the healing power of nature, connection with nature.  So what, then, about minimising our impact on nature? That includes commercialisation and consumerism which directly and indirectly impacts  nature. Yes, the local economy is important and yes, most people, including me, live without much thought, within the society where the richest 1% in the UK own more wealth than the bottom 20% of the entire population, and where the country has lost nearly 50% of its biodiversity since the Industrial Revolution. What we call "the local economy" is part of that impact in that it is all  plugged in to industrial processes that exploit the planet and the most vulnerable people. Nearly everything we do and that we buy contributes to statistics of that ilk.  No politician wants to take the necessary radical action to avoid the coming environmental apocalypse and the social and economic tsunamis that will follow. People are just too comfortable or too entrapped by mortgages, jobs, caring commitments etc to do so themselves. A festival can't attempt to cure that or be political in any way but it sticks in my craw when it has songs about gentleness, nature and healing yet I see next to nothing that it is doing to try to mitigate our effects on that same, sustaining nature. Maybe I misjudge it. A festival like that, to be profitable or even just to break even needs to cater for people who aren't that bothered about those issues or only in a tokenistic way but there are still ways to reduce that impact or at least not make it hard for those concerned enough to want to try.  

One of the main ways to reduce that impact but which would also reduce profitability, is to encourage self-catering. But people seemed to be encouraged the other way: to buy from the traders who came in to provide food and drinks. Not being a festival bunny I guess buying, not making food must be more the festival way.  I was on a tight budget but I like Jamaican food and, tempted by the goat stew I blew £17 on a meal that wasn't worth that on the first night.  I say encouraged because there was no hot water, no wash up, no cover to make food in the rain, apart from the smoker's seat outside the shack.  Until I spotted that I heated brews on the picnic tables, scrubbed out my burnt food cup with a loofah and cold water chucking the dirty water in the bushes and felt I stuck out.  Thank goodness I wasn't trying to do the same as a family. 

I ate apples and nuts for breakfast with green tea.  It was easy and cheap so I continued in that vein over the next week or so with some groundnuts around lunchtime, usually while en route, and a can of vegetable curry or stew and some crackers in the evening after I'd pitched the tent.  Recovered some equilibrium at Enchanted Wilderness, I bought eggs and started the day with scrambled eggs on toast from some of the farm's bread. Some tent neighbors invited me to join them  for dinner one night. Still, when I got home eleven days later, my husband said I looked drawn and had lost weight.

At Cumberlandia I wasn't in the campervan section so maybe they self-catered. Buy or self cater, does any of it make much difference? At the end of the day, self catering ain't foraging and eating hens eggs and even if if were, our overpopulated island and denatured countryside wouldn't support a foraging life. Although, ethically and practically, we are stuck between a rock and a hard place, still, our impact is a question of degree.  

An easier argument is that if you can't afford buying festival food and drink for two days then that's an argument in itself to better support self catering.  West Cumbria is one of the poorest parts of Britain. The local town, Workington had a "Steps to Recovery" centre, a Savers, a Peacock, Betfred, a pawn shop and a Hays travel I guess for people to get away from the bargain basement stores and evident poverty of the place, despite the M&S foodhall on the outskirts and the spanking smart sports centre. In the library was a poster saying that if you didn't have a computer at home West Cumbria was one of a handful of UK sites that qualify for government assistance towards digital access. Festival attendees seemed more Cockermouth and Keswick than Workington and Whitehaven, but that's a guess. Back at Cumberlandia, the food and drink stalls did a good trade.  

I don't remember now if there was recycling but I think not.

                                             

What was curious was that the thing that makes Cumberlandia what it is - creativity, joy, community, music, all of these, need no trappings.  You can look at it another way and say, well, that is what that festival was. Buy stuff for convenience, support the local economy as a by-product and sing or play.  Simple. If you are buying food and drinks and eating it with your friends on the benches, it is very communal.  But if you are solo and want to meet people in, say, a communal kitchen / shelter which, the Enchanted Wilderness event showed was where a lot of meeting happened, then it wasn't that kind of place.

Astonishingly, the woodland setting of The Glade stage, the natural amphitheatre, the trees, the way people gathered, the shape of it all was very like the environment of the profoundly meaningful dream of the musicians in the forest I had had not long before dad died. 

It was this strangest of dreams that had first sent me to Cumbria back in May. How could the two images be so similar and what did it mean? I had no reference points, no guidance, no education for this sort of thing. It was as though I was stepping between two worlds: one I had grown up in and one I had fallen into through a dream.

My health stats were rising steadily again. I figured it was being away from home, or camping, or nature or music or some combination.

Perhaps the point of the festival, which I nearly hadn't gone to, was not necessarily to wholeheartedly enjoy and participate in it, because in that state, I wasn't able. It was just somewhere in nature with music, harmony, community choirs and folk people, who seem down to earth. It was somewhere just to be at this difficult time, somewhere being better than nowhere and this was valuable in itself.

I met a gentle, free spirit, Kevin, who had been in science, had a PhD until he felt a more spiritual call. He felt guided by a hand. How did the guidance appear? In dreams, he said, synchronicities. Wasn't that a dirty word in science? Yes, and that was why he was no longer in that world. Guidance, journeys, intuitions, healing seemed to be very much in the Cumberlandia vibe.

A second, longer, bitingly vicious and slanderous email, copying Social Services, was forwarded on to me on Sunday morning. I crashed back down, through the level of healing reconstruction that had begun reforming itself at Cumberlandia, into a worse blitzed and dizzy state than upon my arrival.  Kevin was passing as I made morning tea.  You're going now? Yes, I wasn't staying for the morning's events. 

We chatted a while.  I mentioned the dream.  You should share your story with Dave!, he said. He would love that!  What? I said, astonished.  The festival was pushing a "share your story" QR code for feedback.  I had thought it was more along the lines of "Ideally, hot water, a shower and a communal area to make food" but Kevin was insistent.   No, he would definitely want to hear that. But I had already seen Dave and mentioned the melodica follow-up to Folk in the Forest. 

I mentioned cheerfully enough so I thought, that I was heading to York.  I wondered, vaguely if he would be the last person I spoke to before - what?  Before I drifted properly off the map or off the edges of society? The last person before something I ought not to be doing or before somewhere I ought not be to going.

*

At Wilderness Tango, a therapist come musician come van-lifer asked: Did you have any interesting connections at the festival? If seemed an unusual question.  I was reminded Kevin.  Yes, I had.  

Over two weeks after leaving Cumberlandia,  a week after my return and after an earlier version of this post had already been published, Kevin came back into my mind's eye.  He was still earnestly encouraging me: share your story.  I almost never publicise The Outpost on social media though as it happens, I did so recently in a wild, vain attempt to find more Latin American musicians. But why send it to an event organiser, even a nice guy like Dave?  Even most of those who know about it, in my experience, prefer to turn a blind eye to The Outpost.  So be cautious, said Experience.  I didn't want to be looked at askance.  Readers find it or hear about it because, well, it's an outpost. Those places aren't much signposted for a reason. 

Still, people had repeatedly told me, and I could see for myself that music, community, healing, nature were all Dave's thing. There were parallels between that and themes in The Outpost. Despite the date for feedback being past, with Kevin's ideas of nudges, synchronicities and a sense of being guided, I nearly did. I could see his face.  He was saying Go on! It was almost like someone saying, Go on, sing! except that I was more confident about writing than singing.  But at the last minute, characteristic misgiving took over.