Glasto

I watched Elton John from the comfort of my living room. His birthday is a day after mine. We Aries always have trouble with our feet, and there was Reggie Dwight stumbling around the stage wearing safe shoes. He said his golden trousers were falling down but that didn’t stop the man from Pinner giving us his best. He made me cry, his energy, his gratitude and some of his songs.
It made me realise that I’m not a dedicated audience member. I’ve spent so much of my life being the entertainment that being entertained is a tall order for whoever is trying to entertain me.

Still those crowds at Glastonbury who got dressed up for the event, those dedicated fans who took the trouble to find Elton glasses, danced around for him and us. They were thanked by the delighted septuagenarian for bothering. I cried at a man who has kept the same band for 53 years. I cried at the commitment of an old man singing in tune, banging in time and still smiling.

I have no desire to go to Glastonbury, but I would have loved to be a member of an audience jumping around in fun and sitting on somebodies shoulders singing along to words that I knew.

And then Glastonbury was over. After three days of televised mayhem it was over.
Back to Rwanda, back to strikes, back to the price of eggs. And good old Britain was left with fields of litter. 2023 and a crisis with our economy, with our NHS, 2023 and we are on the cusp of a summer of discontent, an autumn of savage negotiations and a winter of scrimping and saving.

Dame Priti, Lord Mogg, Sarah Elizabeth Rebecca Vaughan-Brown, Former Personal Adviser to Carrie Johnson, a parade of buffoons with gongs, stare blankly out of our television screens, while the rest of us attempt to hold onto a belief in love and gratitude. As senior doctors, junior doctors, the weary elderly and hoards of the vulnerable, sit in corridors, heads bent, fingers crossed praying that when they wake up things will be magically different.

And now we have a Labour Party that is silencing anything that smells of lefty rebellion. A Labour Party that is lusting after power when all we want is a group of representatives that care. When Lewis Capaldi could no longer sing at Glastonbury, his Tourettes getting the best or him, when Lewis stopped singing the crowd took over. They were his voice. he stood crippled with anxiety and thousands of voice saved him. And that’s what Glastonbury is about. A giant handholding event. What a pity that anything outside of that farm has become cynical and greedy. Anything that is about sharing is deemed ‘Communism’ a dirty word in 2023. Those arseholes in Moscow have tainted anything that smacks of socialism.
The old worlds is in crisis as we argue over words and isms whilst the young bicker over binary or non-binary and whether or not JKRowlings is a gender fascist.

We are now in the middle of climate change, my garden mud is cracking. We have no cuckoos this year. Our streams are drying up and whilst our reservoir is full of water we have a hosepipe ban. We have greedy incompetents in charge. We have greedy wordsmiths twisting and mincing their words so we get more and more confused. The corrupt leaders justify their appalling behaviour whilst the little folk are left mopping up their sewage.

Do not despair, I say to myself. Shine a beacon of light. Believe that we will save our planet. Believe that the greedy landowners will stop cutting down ancient trees and digging up ancient hedges. Believe that by holding firm the change that has been coming will come The planets are aligned. The birds and bees have had enough. The foxes and squirrels have had enough. The children and teachers have had enough. The infirmed and fit have had enough. It’s almost Biblical the scale of destruction at the hands of indecent human beings and yet we still let the nasty brigade have their way.

Glastonbury with its smelly toilets and clowns, Glastonbury with its ideals and generosity, whether you like to or not, is better than the cynical band of tossers in charge in Westminster. It won’t be long until we are all holding hands, not just in Glastonbury.

I struggle to believe, but believe I do that we will tear down the walls of deceit, that good shall reign and that the likes of Rishi will go the way of all papers tigers, tumbling down into the annals of history.