SCREAM!

Which is what you do when you find that the (unable to be replaced for obvious reasons) original artwork that you entrusted to Parcelforce 10 days ago has NOT arrived at its destination in the States, the website can't explain where it has gone, and the depot is closed for Bank Holiday.

The artist sent about 130 banners for the Goddess Conference, I was entrusted with returning them to her, and now they have disappeared into the bowels of the courier system. Well, fuck, is all I can say.

Do go out on the Moor

On Saturday morning I sprung T from the hospital (engine running, sprint down the hallways pursued by medics....actually we sat about for half an hour while the nurse looked for a duty doctor to sign the release forms - which they did. They were very sympathetic to T's wish to get away and allowed him to leave before the consultants came round).

I was accosted by an elderly gentleman in the opposite bed who informed me that the police were present and asked how I'd got into the building. Nearly told him that I'd abseiled down the front, but realised in time that he was delusional. Apparently he spent the whole of Friday night shouting about a plot - which, indeed, there is: the plot of his family to get him to stay in the sodding hospital and not run out into Taunton in his nightgown. Oh dear.

Then we drove to Dartmoor, found the place where the weekend's workshop was being held, and did what we'd come to do, which was:

( Read more... )

( Read more... )

During the day, T and I managed to make a trip to the local post office to buy a pasty for lunch, and had a look at the post bridge, which is an old stone bridge, very rudimentary, across the river, and we also walked a bit onto the moor. Dartmoor is beautiful: very dark, with long sweeps of hill covered now by heather and rowan, ravens tumbling overhead. The place at which the workshop was run is ancient: a longhouse surrounded by cottages and farm buildings, with a stream running through the old field systems. Down between banks of hazel trees is a roundhouse, a stone and thatch building very reminiscent of the shaman's iyill in Siberia that Deirdre and I visited 3 years ago now.

The people who run these workshops, Carolyn Hillyer and Nigel Shaw, are musicians; Carolyn also does a lot of artwork and she organises visits to various shamanic Sami groups in Lapland, where she has connections. They are both remarkably talented and remarkably kind people, and I recommend their workshops and their work. More here if you're interested:

http://www.druidnetwork.org/profiles/people/carolyn_hillyer.html

http://www.seventhwavemusic.co.uk/home.htm

The best thing about the weekend was not that I made a wonderful flute and a drum, but that everyone else did, too: seeing the look on people's faces as they realised what they'd accomplished was very moving. And one of them was T: that he managed to do all this the morning after what has been quite a nasty, if technically minor, operation, prior to treatment for cancer, just amazes me. One woman took me aside and said, you know, that's inspirational. And I think so, too.