SGP 2008

The bus back home was crowded with people, but somehow it was quite cool onboard, whilst outside the sun was literally attacking everything it could. The heat over the weekend had been bordering on unbearable and I’d spent most of the time stuck directly under its powerful rays, which inevitably lead to t-shirts wet with sweat, bad feet, and a layer of festival dirt on my whole body which made me feel all crusty. I hoped no-one on the bus would notice, or mention, my terrible smell. That had happened once, at the Dublin ferry port. The obese redneck woman behind me in the queue declared “someone smells of B.O.”, and I knew she meant me, but I didn’t honour her with a reply, I just made sure I sat near her once we got on the boat.

Less than an hour before I was in the middle of a few thousand people at a festival, but now here I was, surrounded by old couples and a scattering of young kids going into town for the afternoon. Less than twelve hours ago I had been drunkenly stumbling around the picturesque grounds of the festival, watching the different funny hand shadows we had been making in front of the random projectors. Unfortunately there comes a point when you have to return to reality and face the fact that you can’t get stoned in a field, make believe peace and love, watch bands endlessly, laugh so hard your face hurts, drink free ice cold beer intended for the press and climb sculptures and trees whenever you want and do whatever the hell you want to.

It’s a sad moment when you leave a festival knowing there will be plenty going on while you go back to whatever it is that you do. You look over your shoulder, out the back of the car window, and watch as the tents, the luminous security jackets, and stages diminish farther and farther into the distance, ending up as plain green fields. They said the festival was a secret, and they were right; from half a mile out of the gates you couldn’t see any trace of a festival at all. It really was a complete secret from any road nearby.

We’d turned up to the festival late on Thursday night, having had a gig earlier that evening. We knew between which two villages it was located but would have had trouble finding it if it had not been night by that point. Because it was dark we could see all the multi-coloured lights; the reds, purples, greens and blues illuminating the sky, and we used them as our guide. We all stood up in the van to get a better view as we drew closer and closer. Everyone was genuinely excited, however tired and stoned we were, to be arriving at a festival in the middle of the night. It was the realisation, mainly, that we were free for the weekend to get as drunk as we wanted and wander until our feet were numb, but also the fact that we were all stiff and rusty from a long drive crammed into the back of an old minibus. I must have been most sore because I had spent the last three hours sandwiched between a pile of tent bags, two chairs, three people and a rusty old tool box.

Once we were parked up we unloaded all our crap and picked out a nice enough camping spot. Everyone threw up their tents, except for the one I was staying in, which took three people almost an hour to figure out in the dark. We started walking off to explore the site. I was struck firstly by how small the festival was; you could walk from one end to the other in five minutes, tops. Having a site so small really had its perks because you didn’t have to worry about missing much of any band if you wanted to run back to the tents. Reading Festival had nothing on this, nothing at all. At Reading you have to think in terms of a ten minute walk almost everywhere, whereas here it was three, if that. The small size made you feel at home somehow, and after a day I began to recognise the same faces walking past me.

The camping field lead straight into the festival itself, there were no fences and little security as you walked around. Anyone could sleep wherever they wanted; they could walk, shout, eat and drink anywhere. A real happy hippie / family type affair. On top of a pyramid of hay bales we found a guy fast asleep, uninterrupted by the people all over the place who were warming up for the weekend’s proceedings. I lowered myself down into the gap in the middle of the hay, until just my head was sticking up out of the top, then someone said ‘manure’ and I clambered out as quickly as possible. My jeans smelt terrible after that, but I don’t think there was any manure in the middle at all, just sweaty rotting hay.

Things were placed around the festival to keep it exciting. Some hammocks strung between trees with people asleep inside, right next to a stage which was hidden away in bushes and shrubbery. I think someone said the stage was named after some children’s TV show but I’d never seen it. All around us were low hanging trees with different things suspended from each one; a load of eerie looking puppets, paper lanterns, a collection of assorted odd shoes, and one wrapped in layers of coloured wools! There was even a lake which separated two of the stages, the mud wrestling arena, twenty or so stalls, a couple of little bars and chill out tents from even more little tents, the scrap dragon building area, the crèche, a few sculptures, and even more food stalls. To get between the two areas of the site a walkway had been constructed straight across a lake and was illuminated by thousands of tiny strip lights. A lot of thought had gone into making the festival a bit different from others, and it certainly did stand out from the crowd. The crowd I had previously known.

I can’t stress enough the amount of random different things going on, even at 2am. I had known very little about the festival before I got there, but a festival is a festival after all, you’re always bound to have tons of fun, but I really wasn’t expecting this! So many things had been constructed just to marvel at, or to climb, that it had a solid vibe, which wasn’t even directly music-related. The whole event had been planned to keep people interested, to keep people alert, on their toes, and to allow people to let their eccentricities come right to the surface, even if it was only for the weekend. 

It was during the next day that I managed to acquire a little something which allowed me almost the highest of privileges; free beer. None of our camp had much money at all, which meant we were all lacking in beer, smoke and enthusiasm, which seemed to put a bit of a dampener on the possibilities the weekend could provide. I mean I’m not a drunk, but I’m a drinker, and beer and festivals seem to go pretty much hand in hand. It’s quite strange how a whole weekend frying under the sun could be made a lot more interesting with a few cans and some good company.

We staggered up to the press tent and someone who knew the guys in charge managed to blag passes for our whole camp! When these passes were flashed at the security guards it pretty much meant ‘free roam’ and we could access wherever the hell we wanted to; including the fridge in the press tent which was full of ice cold cans. But that’s not all, it was full of ice cold cans of my favourite beer! Could it get much better than this? Now we could grab a couple of cans, go a-wandering and drinking, come back, grab more beer, and repeat the same process all weekend, during the day or night.

However, the press passes brought some pain as well as joy. Sitting with Mick from X Magazine in the press tent made me even more sure that I was on the right path and he, a complete slave to corporate reporting and huge glossy magazines, was on the wrong one. It was warmer inside the tent than it was in the sun and my brain started feeling kind of fried after a minute or so of talking to him, but for some reason I felt the need to speak to him still, it was like I was glued down to my seat. I realise now that that glue was astonishing bullshit.

“I’m Dave from such-and-such Magazine. I’m the youngest writer the magazines ever had, everyone else is over thirty, and I’m twenty-four. I run the front section of the magazine”. And as soon as he said that I let him know where my favourite section of that magazine was; “right at the back, where they recommend records”. That didn’t phase him though. 

He talked and talked, on and on, blah blah blah, and all of it was so unbelievably boring. Self-loathing and self-promotion was all he seemed to care about, but he had the ability to blag, which is obviously needed in his line of work. Whether he was convincing or not didn’t seem to phase him at all, he just talked about Juliana Hatfield and showed us his K Records tattoo. It seemed like music was all new to him, like he had to tell us all these band names, whereas almost everyone I know sees music as an absolute staple of the very being. Meanwhile, lurking around in the background, was a young and beautiful Canadian photographer who was busy listening in, taking notes, and trying to understand how so much shit can come from one person. I can’t remember her name but she took a photo of Nic and me on the sofa in there, after a lot of heat and beer, and I looked like I’d just been woken from the dead!

The last straw came when he started to question a couple of us as to why we live in Northampton. He asked us questions which seemed to degrade our choices of inhabitancy, something which can be a sore spot when probed in the wrong manner, as he did. “Why do you live there? What does it do for you? Does anything good happen there? What about moving to the city?”  How can you answer those sorts of questions? And to the city! Huh. And when you’re asked them by an idiot with a loud voice? He seemed to ask all the questions I would never ask someone, questions way too personal. Questions which offended, questions which seemed to question why you make the choices you make, which you make for good or ill, personal decision.

There and then he reaffirmed my faith in independent press by coming from a mainstream magazine approach and sucking the life out of music which is full of life. At least we have the ability to do it ourselves, without that there may be more of these kind of drones around. 

At some point on the second day I met the head gardener, or the guy in charge of the whole festival. He owned the land and oversaw the whole event. He was making good use of the free beer and seemed to be totally comfortable surrounded by festival-goers, and blending in with the crowd effortlessly. Not that I expected the boss to wear a suit or anything, but I was immediately struck by how relaxed he was at having eight thousand people reeking havoc on his land for the weekend.

We only exchanged a few words but the legend of the man, his festival and his land spread quickly amongst us. Jamie relayed the pretty fascinating story to me. In 1066 William The Conqueror invaded England, leading the Normans in a string of victories over the Anglo-Saxons. England didn’t fall easily at first, the Northerners putting up a particularly strong resistance, but most of the country was under Norman rule by 1087. He divided up the land between his followers, including a certain plot near Huntingdon which all dips down into a lake in the centre, this plot being the very heart of today’s festival.

And the same family has owned the plot ever since. Whereas the land is timeless, the festival roots can easily be traced back. Only four years old, it was originally a very big party for friends and family of the head gardener and since then it has got out of hand really. Today the festival feels small and friendly, and still manages to maintain some intimacy, unlike a lot of other festivals, but relies heavily on its beautiful picturesque surroundings.

For me the highlight of the weekend was my final day at the festival. Mostly I wandered around looking for food and scouting stuff out, nipping back and forth to the press tent for beer every now and then. A couple of us tried to watch some ex-MI5 lady dish the dirt but the tent was so packed we couldn’t even get in so we kept walking around in circles. As it got dark, the festival became more interesting. People seemed to hide a bit during the day, in their tents or in the shade, but when it got cooler and night fell everyone let themselves go. I mean, really let themselves go. Evidently, the drugs and the booze began to take hold by the final day and it wasn’t uncommon to see a guy riding a piano with wheels - and playing at the same time, or to spot large groups using catapults to shoot water balloons at the pirate ship in the middle of the lake. Everyone was in on it; even I pushed Rob around in a wheelchair which looked like some horrible art sculpture for a while, before we crashed down some steps.

All of a sudden the sky started to become illuminated with these strange white shapes floating up and up. I had to be told that they were half paper lanterns, half hot air balloons. Hundreds of them were set off once it was dark. I couldn’t make out where they were coming from; it seemed to be all around the whole site. They sure looked cool though and captured everyone, looking skyward with open mouths. You could almost hear the whole festival ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’.

You’d never see hundreds of paper lanterns getting set off and rising into the sky at any big festival, they wouldn’t bother spending their precious money on doing anything interesting. That’s what sets small, independent festivals apart from major festivals; they want to keep their attendees interested in the festival, and talk about it once it’s over. With a festival like Reading the organisers just wanna get the money, get the bands on in huge tents, get the festival-goers in, get them sedated with booze and get them out when it’s all finished. There’s no heart to it. There’s no soul. There’s no celebration of the people actually attending the festival, which means the emphasis is not on the crowd who actually make the festival. Whereas at the Secret Garden they seemed to be trying to involve everyone, trying to get everyone attentions and to celebrate each and every persons own eccentricities. It seems like that is impossible, to celebrate everyone attending, but they managed to pull it off pretty well.

The absolute high point of the weekend, for me at least, came on the same night. We’d walked around pretty much all day. We’d made hand shadows with a projector. We’d looked at all the sculptures. Then we decided to go and build something in the recycled rubbish tent, but we were sidetracked on the way to the tent by these people singing on top of a weird box. Now, I’ve tried to explain the events which followed to a few people but never manage to convey the sheer amazement I felt over those few minutes, which is why I’m probably going to end up writing a lot about it.

Imagine a box about 15ft wide, deep and high, which on the outside looks like wooden panelling, plonked right in the middle of a festival field. On the flat roof are a few people singing rowdily, and you can just see a piano peeking over the very top. Walking around the box it appears that there is no way in, but there is, and it’s a tiny little walkway. Once inside the box you manage to see how the whole thing is held together: scaffolding. Tons of pipes go every which way, all of which have random multicoloured decorations dangling down like the insides of party poppers. Looking up through this crazy little world, you can just see an opening at the top which leads onto the roof, where the people are singing. In our interest at that very moment we started climbing up, pulling ourselves up on the scaffolding, and taking a tiny little ladder for the last few feet onto the roof.

On the top there were about twenty people all sorta standing around talking and drinking. A guy was sat down at the piano, with another big cockney geezer leaning on it. These two were the key. Almost immediately they started playing in a choppy sorta honky-tonk piano style, we all started bobbing along, then the big guy started singing in a thick cockney accent: “How many special people change? How many lives are living strange? Where were you while we were getting high?” People picked up the song and started to join in. I ripped a shaker off the wall and started shaking-along, a huge grin stretching across my face. We all sang along (badly). The song ended and they asked if there were any requests. “Play some Beatles!” I shouted, but they said they’d come back to The Beatles stuff. Then the piano started again in that choppy style. No-one knew what song they would be singing next until the first line came in. We all waited anxiously. “She came from Greece, she had a thirst for knowledge, she studied sculpture at St Martins College, that’s where I, caught her eye.” Everyone picked it up and started singing along, all rowdy. We caused a good racket, enough to gain more and more peoples interest, during only this one song.

For the three minutes on top of that box we were in a world where that song mattered more than it did at Glastonbury ’95. Twenty ragged folks on top of a huge box were more important than Pulp right there, and the lyrics seemed to mean much more than when Cocker first wrote them. Or maybe it was just me? It could be that I was the only one completely floored by those brief few minutes. It seems hard to convey the feeling I felt right there at that time. Then again, it’s always difficult to explain what makes someone feel that certain way, that way they’ve only ever felt once.

The Story of My Life

Some days I wake up and I don’t want to do anything. I don’t want to ride my bike, I don’t want to read a book, I don’t want to listen to Latterman, I don’t even want to write. It’s not laziness; it’s just a feeling of apathy. One thing I want to do everyday, not matter what the day, without fail, is to see my friends, to chat, to laugh and to be in good company. On this particular morning this was the definitely the way I was feeling. I wanted to see friends but I was due in work for an eight hour shift on the dishwasher. Work had been getting me down for months, I wanted to quit so badly, I’d had enough of whinging customers nagging at me like it was my fault the café sucked so much. Just to make it worse we’d been interrogated by our manager too.

While I was eating breakfast the phone rang and it was Dan. “We’re going on a road trip to some reservoir out past Leicester do you want to come?” I love road trips; there is nothing that beats cruising along with your friends in the sun, window down, just watching the scenery pass you by so I instantly said ‘yeah of course I’ll join you’. It was a perfect day for a road trip, the weather was just right for it, nice and warm, not the sort of day you want to let slip you by while you wash dishes and breathe in air-conditioned oxygen for hours. I folded up my uniform and went out into the day, the best thing would be not to phone work at all. Instead I’d just never bother going back, and they’d eventually get the idea that I wasn’t coming into work ever again.

Both sides of us were fields for miles and miles, an old archway bridge way off in the distance, typical British countryside. We ploughed on, arriving at Rutland Water in the early evening. We got out and walked around for a bit, stopping to talk to the fishermen to see what they’d caught and eventually we settled by the water for a while in the heat. We passed a few joints around and watched the sunset over the water, ending up very stoned in the dark. The story of my life.

The Treehouse

Kyle’s little brother, Connor, was telling us about his treehouse, which he was building with a couple of friends. The whole estate had gone from green fields to modern houses with winding roads within five years, so there were always scraps of wood around, left behind by the builders. As long as the estate had been being built there had been kids taking the wood for various projects: go-karts, treehouses. For a small enough estate the amount of robbery was quite high straight from the word go, from the building site anyway. Connor had explained where his treehouse was to us and I suddenly realised he must have started building his in the exact same tree that my friends and I had built one before, not that many years ago.

Being half my height and age Connor’s estimate of both distance and time was completely different to mine. He told us it would take ten minutes to get there, but really it only took five. ‘Big ditches’ were nothing more than a small leap for us, whereas he had to scramble over log by log, mound by mound. He lead us across a familiar long grassy field, then along a line of trees and bushes at the very edge of the field. The path was well-worn but the rain had turned it all into a thick mud and treading soon became a great effort. A barbed wire fence, a few trees and an embankment were all that kept us from the railway track.

Connor took back onto the grass and ran on ahead. Kyle and I lagged behind a little. “I think it’s the same treehouse as the old one” he told me.

“That’s what I’m thinking” I replied, “it’ll be so fucking weird to see it again”. Just as I spoke Connor came to a stop on the crest of the hill, waving and pointing back at us. “It is” I said, looking sideways at Kyle, both of us grinning because we’re about to get a blast from the past and we’re both in our elements; out in the open.

We trod the last few steps onto the hill, paused and took a few steps back to get a good look at the poor old tree. I shook my head, ‘so different’ I thought ‘but still familiar’. Kyle recounted and old story about the treehouse, something about the building site and it all came flooding back. Memory and a real love of nostalgia can sometimes hit you like that.

I was around 17 at the time, pretty old to be building treehouses really but I still did it because it was so much fun to put things together. I hadn’t actually been in on the original project at the tree, no that was a small crew from the Grammar School who all lived on the estate while it was still being built. I think there was only four of them: Mike S, Butlin, Bloomy and Becky. The funny thing about the Grammar School kids in our town is that they are more degenerate than anyone else I ever knew, and twice as hippie as Woodstock ’69.

It was obvious why they had chosen that one tree as the spot for their big project: it was fairly secluded, on the edge of the field, home wasn’t far for the tools and the building site was inbetween the two. Being hippies they didn’t want to hurt the tree at all. Which was nice of them. So, armed with a few scrap planks, nails, rope and a hammer, they constructed their first main platform, except they didn’t nail into the tree at all. They would rest planks onto the tree and then tie them down onto a branch, instead of nailing them down.

The very first time I visited them up there the whole project took me totally by surprise; I was amazed at how well it had been made, and the sheer size of the thing.

“It’s resting on branches?” I remember asking Mike S when he first told me about it. I thought it to be terribly unstable but it really wasn’t, it was built better than the whole fuckin’ estate.

They had constructed a single platform, stretched across two big branches that was about 7ft high on one side and 15ft high on the other, because it was built over a downward hill on that side. Made entirely of stolen and scrap pieces of wood and pallets, with tools borrowed from parents and not actually nailed to the tree, the original platform was a work to really admire. Grammar School had truly paid off for this small and dedicated crew of treehousers. The state school kids all came and admired the impressive work and decided to get involved. This is when it all went downhill really, and I admit: I helped ruin it, by helping build it with the rest of the idiots.

Originally the treehouse was just one level, about 6ft square, enough space to sit and stretch out if you wanted. It was such a good treehouse that everyone who saw it wanted to help work on it, and following the Grammar kids method of gathering materials, we would all wait until dark and then run across to the building site.

All those nights of secret building site gathering missions must have cost someone, and that’s why the builders would come and take back any planks that weren’t nailed down. We had to work very fast to build the treehouse, before our materials were stolen back from us. It was always dark by the time we set off to gather materials; the cover of night was all we mischievous juvenile youth needed. There would be anywhere between 5 to 20 of us on these midnight missions. We’d creep around the estate looking for anything left unlocked that we could use on the treehouse. Usually: planks, pallets, boards and nails. Sometimes we would have to go into the building site to get materials. It was never hard to lift the fence out of its base and walk on in. I didn’t mind stealing from these sites because I just felt that they were stealing hundreds of thousands of pounds from people by selling these terrible houses. That was my motive to take from them a little of what they’d taken; and plus we were using the things we stole for a genuine creative goal: to educate ourselves about building treehouses.

Creeping around on a building site, late at night, and usually stoned, one would expect to get paranoid, and it was me who tended to keep an eye out for anyone about to bust us. While everyone else climbed over the half-built houses, looking for materials as much as having a good time, I stood on piles of bricks, or rubble, shaking my head and wondering when we were leaving. When everyone got drunk in the woods for Mike S’ leaving party we somehow ended up on the building site at 4am. Everyone scaled a half-built house, like usual, but following Mike S’ lead they all took it in turns to jump into the netting strung between the walls instead of floors. I couldn’t watch, way too sketchy for me, I walked home instead, leaving the party in full swing without me.

The next night was quite successful on the materials gathering front. Bloomy had found a valderall on the other side of the estate and suggested we go get it for materials. A valderall is what they use to transport long lengths of pipe; they look like a giant cotton reel. Ours was about 12ft high and we all stood round it that night, debating whether to wheel it all the way across the estate. We decided to try it, however long it took and set off under the cover of night.

We took it in turns to push and steer as we scrambled it over rubble, on the roads, across people’s front lawns, hills and fields, all the way to the treehouse. Had we have been caught we would obviously have run and left it wherever it was. Imagine looking out your window in the middle of the night and seeing a dozen punks, coughing and stumbling along, pushing a huge wooden reel. You’d probably think you were tripping. The whole mission took a good four hours, slow and pain staking. By the time we’d pushed it over the long grass we were all shattered. We left it by the treehouse and went home to sleep, “we’ll sort it out tomorrow” we’d all said, but we didn’t.

Within two weeks, and several late night salvage missions later the tree house had almost tripled in size. There was always people hanging out there, working or not, and it just seemed to grow out of control. The platform had now grown to twice its original size, we had a fireman’s pole and one side, tied to a branch, a ladder up through the hatch and even two smaller ‘personal’ levels higher up. What upset the Grammar School lot was that it was now being built into the tree, instead of onto the tree. We were all nailing it wherever we could, building it as fast as possible for the hell of it, not carefully planning and building like they did. It was still surprisingly sturdy with two dozen people on it sitting around or working. A couple of days later everyone had installed a wall to protect themselves from the closing in elements a little bit more. The Grammar kids who built the thing in the first place were so furious that their project had so many people working on it that they ditched the whole thing and weren’t seen working on it again. They did come back, but only to criticise our efforts.

I must mention the view we had atop the treehouse. The railway embankment was on one side of the treehouse, lined with trees, but on the far side of that you could get a great view of green rolling fields and an old farmhouse just visible on the horizon, where the field sloped down. Even this field has been ripped up now, and made into a stupid bypass road. Looking the other way from the treehouse was, in the foreground, a huge long grassy field, which was quite subtly un-even. On the left hand side of the view, behind the field, was the building site. On the right had side in the distance was the new estate, in all its stinking suburban glory, with as many problems as a run-down ghetto already, but to get there you had to pass the stagnant pond first.

I was about the most senior builder on the project by now and the reason I stopped helping out is a story itself. The valderall never even got used for anything on the treehouse, it sat there in the field, and the grass grew and grew around it. Sometimes people would wheel it around a little, but they always brought the damn thing back. That was a good thing in the end, as I might have been shot if it weren’t for the giant cotton reel.

No-one was doing any work that day, and there was about 10 of us just milling around and wasting time at the treehouse. We were all sat around chatting when out of nowhere a can on the branch next to me went ping and fell off. At first we carried on talking, presuming it was the wind, but then we heard it again. A gunshot. We looked at the bullet hole in the tree, a tiny pellet was deep inside the bark. Enough to kill someone if it went into the wrong part of the body. We realised we were being shot at from somewhere and began to panic. Everyone hit the deck and plotted their way down from the tree. “I’m taking the fireman’s pole”, “I’m just gonna jump”. We waited for another shot to be fired, and then it came, the third bullet and dug into another part of the tree. Everyone jumped up and scrambled down the tree, as the snipers reloaded. We all ran to hide behind the valderall and as I joined them all we heard one more final shot dig into a plank.

10 of us, petrified, shaking, clinging onto a valderall as a shield from getting shot. We were scared, worrying where exactly the shots were being fired from. I thought we were going to actually get shot, and die, and I was vocal about it. As we looked around the field for the sniper we spotted a group of four people lying down in the long grass. “There they are! That’s who’s shooting at us. They’re hiding, look!”

We kept hiding behind the valderall, not really knowing what our next move should be. We kept our eyes on the people out in the grass as they got nearer and nearer. We all tried to hide behind one side of the wheel as they came right up to us. We closed our eyes and hoped for it to not be a military style execution. When they came in front of us we all sighed, out of pure relief. We knew them all, it was the Grammar kids, “out and about taking shrooms in the grass” they said “thought we’d come by”. Butlin chased away after a non-existent cow, running straight into a wire fence and going face-first into a bush. They didn’t have an air rifle with them, that’s just a bad idea on mushrooms, so the question of where the bullets came from was still unanswered. We decided to leave and walked across the grass, downhill, with the people tripping. Everyone rolled around in the grass but, paranoid of snakes, I laughed at them all and stood standing.

That was the last time I went to the treehouse. I mean, getting shot at would be enough to scare anyone off. No-one ever heard any rumour, no matter how vague, about who it was doing the shooting, but we stayed away just in case there was a second time.

Kyle’s little brother scrambled up a dodgy little ladder and onto what used to be the main platform, now just a couple of burnt-out planks, dead looking. Even Connor and his friends, quite obviously, only had half the work ethic, or time, as we did. Kyle and I walked up to the tree. Only about 3 planks remaining now, hanging on as reminders, but mostly the whole thing was gone. I found about a third of its bits and pieces down the steep embankment, lying broken and burnt under a stolen scooter. I climbed up onto the few planks that were left and Connor handed me a little plank followed by a nail and a hammer. I lay the plank out over two branches and butted it up to another one. I rested the nail on the wood above the branch and took the hammer in my hand. One test hit, like old times, and then I drove the nail into the wood, bit by bit, over and over until it disappeared. It all felt wrong: why am I bothering getting involved in someone else’s project here? My work had been done on a different treehouse, which just happened to be in the same tree. Nothing will ever come close to our old treehouse in the tree again, and that’s why we should let the memory fizzle on the back burner instead of even trying to relive it.

Going back and seeing it trashed and all burnt out was closure for me. Closure of the whole time I’d spent there. I realised then that making a treehouse would probably never be the same again, and I forced myself to accept it, for it is a sad thing when a man realises he shouldn’t ever build a treehouse again. But I couldn’t help telling myself that I really should have expected a trashed, shell of a platform, and not a ‘mansion-in-a-tree’ as Mike S described it the first time he told me about the whole thing.

Climbing Trees

A favourite pastime of mine when I was younger, back when the summer days seemed so joyous and endless that they would last forever, was to pass the time climbing trees with my friends. It was a real hobby, which seems so far off now in this new century filled with computers and technology and gadgets and pressure, that constant weight. I haven’t climbed a tree in a few years, but I know I still could if I wanted to, I’m flexible enough. But it’s no longer a pastime of mine like it was during childhood. I do different things now; I’m a completely different person to the old jetty-kid in me who used to play cricket in the alleyway every night.

The children now don’t seem at all interested in going to the park to run around or exploring the environment they where live, or even climbing trees. They are hopelessly passive, fed what they believe they want. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone build a den in a tree, or bushes, or anywhere, since I was building my own what now seems like a whole lifetime ago. We’d once built our own human-sized bird’s nest on top of a patch of trees near the old bomb shelter. It was made up of a million little branches weaving in and out of each other, but just dense enough to hold us up. You could get a great view along the railway from the top of that tree.

Climbing trees is what we did. Although young, we were professionals. My friend Jo was the best tree climber by far; he always managed to get right to the very top. We were both short for our age, and very nimble. This is really what helped us along in our tree climbing careers. It was what we lived for in those days. I probably spent around a third of my childhood in bed, a third at school, and a third out and about, or up in trees, with or without friends. Finding trees you could fit more than two people in were in high demand. We eventually did find one, in the graveyard, where we could easily have five or six people sitting inside, quite comfortably, on different branches. No-one ever noticed us in that tree because the foliage was so thick, but once you had climbed up into it the centre was almost hollow.

Cows had even surrounded us once, and cornered us up in a tree. We were out in the fields picking conkers and, being the curious animals they are, they gathered round the bottom of the trunk to see what we were doing. Before we knew it there was no way of getting past them. Both Jo and I were scared for a moment, but we quickly realised there was nothing to do except stay still and wait for them to get bored, leave and eat more grass. 

It’s true; not much can actually be achieved by climbing trees all afternoon, but that is not the point. Not much is achieved by sitting in front of a television for hours on end. The difference between the two is that when climbing trees you are outside, breathing the clear air and exploring the world around you. Explorer – the word seems to sum up my childhood in Rugby, when I was even more eager to walk every street, to play in every park or field and to find every single secret secluded spot I could.

One such spot, which seemed so secluded at the time, was at Draycote Water, a nature reserve and reservoir on the outskirts of our town. On the very edge of the field, sitting alongside a thick hedgerow marking the border of the reserve, was a small patch of trees. In reality, not very secluded at all, anyone picnicking that day could easily see us climbing the trees.  Predominantly horse-chestnuts, we’d ride our bikes out to them when the time of year came round again to play conkers on the playground. See, we were young and naïve and we thought that the most solid conkers, and therefore the ones you were mostly likely to win with, were only to be found on the very far reaches of the town. Soaking the conker in vinegar, cooking it in the oven, leaving it in the fridge; we’d tried them all but to no avail. Ours kept on breaking.

Although the conkers we pulled from this tree did break, we thought that the ones from this particular tree had more staying power in a match than most of the others we had picked before. They seemed worn in already somehow, like the conker itself was ready to meet its true youthful destiny, dangling proudly at the end of a piece of string. A solid brown lump, hanging humble and patient, ready to be smashed into smithereens.

The memory, even now, burns vivid in the depths of my mind. We’d developed a new technique to get the conkers from the ‘super-tree’ at Draycote over that season. One person would climb up the tree and, because these were quite small horse-chestnut trees, would hold onto the trunk for dear life and shake the tree as violently as possible. The whole thing would sway a little, branches jerking with each shake. This would cause the conkers to shower down in a heavy, spiky green rain. Between shakes, everybody on the ground would scurry around picking up all the prizes, hoarding them together in makeshift satchels using the fronts of their t-shirts.

On this particular afternoon, I was up in the tree, watching everyone gather the treasures beneath me. I looked around the tree and spotted the ultimate prize: the biggest, most rich green spiky casing. Surely, it held the king of all conkers inside its protective shell. ‘I must have this one, I’ll be champion for years’, was my first thought. And so I walked out on the branches, holding onto two in my hands and standing on another two, easing myself out onto the edges of the canopy. Very slow and cautious, inch by inch, I moved further away from the tree trunk until the branches beneath me started bending.

Further and further I cautiously crept out, when all of a sudden: snap! The branch under my left foot cracked and I began to fall down and down. Branches snapped beneath me as I fell. The fall seemed to last forever. I was slapped in the face by spiky conkers as leaves smeared against my clothes. I landed on the floor, still standing perfectly upright with a pile of snapped branches between my legs. I dropped the two broken branches in my hands and took a step away from the pile. All my friends burst out laughing. I had managed to fall about 20ft from the tree, taking a third of its poor branches with me. I walked away un-hurt, without scratches even, but the tree came off much worse, almost destroyed. We kept on gathering our conkers. We would laugh and occasionally repeat the story for another quick laugh. Sometimes stories only increase in humorous value the more you tell them.

Even now, almost a decade later, I occasionally go to look at the tree I fell from; to see its form and how the branches are recovering. It still produces conkers but the branches that I snapped in the fall still show obvious battle wounds. They are growing back, slowly, but I still feel a bit guilty about the fall and the damage I caused. Talking to trees sounds like crusty hippy business but I talk to this tree out of guilt. And although I’m not really an animist, I tell it the same thing I tell it every time; ‘I’m really sorry about that’.

My Bedroom The Junkpile

“Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss”  - Joan Didion

When the old art college in Leamington got shut down and relocated I thought it’d be a nice idea to go and have a look around the place whilst there was nothing inside and no renovation work going on. The building had stood for a long time, and many years before it became an art college, it was the Leamington public library so it’s got plenty of history.

          So, on my way to a gig at the Well I stopped by the place to have a browse around. It looked much sadder than the last time I’d visited, maybe it was missing having people busy studying inside its walls, after all those years the walls would be longing for some sort of action. Anyway, I hopped the fence and walked down alongside the place, on the basement level and searched for a way in but it looked quite impossible without a crowbar. Everything was tight shut. No loss, I thought, I’ll just have a quick look in the huge 10ft high skip in the car park instead.

          So I did that, I climbed up the side and pulled myself over and into the skip. I couldn’t believe what I saw inside. It was half full of old Apple Macs, broken chairs, old art portfolios (what a waste), other assorted artwork and tons more bits and pieces. Straight off, the Apple Macs looked soaked through, I could only presume they were ruined but I did manage to bring a reel to reel tape player, some huge plastic sheets with orange and green swirls printed on them and also a whole ton of Letraset home with me. Where did I put it? In my room, of course, it just got added to my ever growing collection of things which I think have some importance or, as some would have it, junk.

          I’m getting low on space in my room amidst the collections of records, zines, postcards, flyers, badges, books and musical equipment. It’s not that I even intended for all these things to grow into fully-fledged collections, but it happens. You get a postcard from here, and another from there and you don’t want to throw them away because they have that tiny amount of sentimental value, not only to the person receiving the card but also the sender. Everything in my archives holds some form of sentimental value to me, even if no-one else can see that value. This is what holds me back from throwing anything at all out. Every single flyer I have holds a memory, maybe of receiving the flyer in the gutter outside the gig, maybe of being at the gig or maybe even the walk home from the gig. As my collections grow I find myself taking on some sort of position as keeper of all local punk ephemera, which not only holds memories for me but also the lives of my friends with whom I shared those times with that are trapped inside my archive.

          I am not only holding onto my archives because of their sentimental value and memories, I’m holding onto them for easy reference. I have all my books and zines within arms reach in my room because fairly often when I need to reference such and such a weird passage in an equally weird and obscure zine I can do it at ease. When friends come over they can’t believe that anyone held onto this crap and the extent of it, they can’t believe that it’s in order, some of it even alphabeticalised. They fumble through my box of flyers asking about bands, times, places. They ask questions about old zines that were never even printed in double figures and I rush around answering their questions and searching for more little bits and pieces that make up the rest of the story and I realise that I am deeply in my element.

          I haven’t hoarded all the pieces that make up my archive just for sentimental value, but because one was never enough and I would look through my Dads archive, made up of fairly similar bits and pieces, and just be absolutely fascinated just like my friends are when they dig through mine. It all makes me start to wonder. Was my Dad in his element when I prodded and asked him questions when I dug through his archives?