Remembering the Glastonbury Festival

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We first went to Glastonbury in the summer of 1987, taking Alex and Adrian, then eight and six. The festival was already well established, but it was still, then, a CND-aligned, broadly hippy occasion: an enclave of the sixties and seventies still persisting in Somerset.

Once the tent was pitched, it was magical simply to wander. Stalls sold joss sticks, exotic sculptures and paintings; music came from marquees where you could stop and discover some band or act. People were calm, relaxed and friendly. This was a million miles from the practised, impersonal friendliness of business; at Glastonbury at that time the people were there to celebrate an unironic shared cause of peace and love - and to enjoy themselves in an uncomplicated way.

This vaguely spiritual atmosphere seemed to extend across the entire festival. Intrinsic virtue - virtue-signalling was not yet a big thing.

We returned with Alex and Adrian two years later, in 1989. Beautiful weather, great music, the same easy friendliness. It felt very, very safe.

When Clare and I next went, without the children, it was 1993. The character of the place had changed utterly. Madchester was in and hippies were out. The drug dealers from Bristol carried inch-thick wads of filthy banknotes. There was an air of criminality. A high perimeter fence encircled the festival, and security was much in evidence.

The following year Channel 4 would arrive and Glastonbury would be subsumed into metropolitan boho culture - in which it remains enmired today.

Nevertheless in '93 we tried to recreate that old atmosphere, the two of us.

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At the end of the weekend we returned to our car and found it had been broken into. Some of our belongings had been stolen.

We never went again.

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A quick review of my plans (no more French classes!)

My little foray into improving my French did not last long. I sent the following email this morning [translation at the bottom of the page].

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Un rapide aperçu de mes projets

"Chère Annie,

J'attends notre cinquième cours cet après-midi, mais je pense que ce sera le dernier pendant un moment.

Cela n'a rien à voir avec ton excellent enseignement! Je suis impressionné par ton travail acharné et ta préparation - tu es toujours incroyablement serviable et sympathique.

Voici ce que je pense. J'ai commencé ces leçons avec toi pour deux raisons. Premièrement, je voulais vérifier mes propres compétences en conversation (pas aussi bonnes que je le pensais!). Deuxièmement, je voulais évaluer combien d'efforts et de temps seraient nécessaires pour atteindre un niveau de base de compétence parlée.

Il semble clair que je devrais passer une heure par jour, presque tous les jours pendant au moins un an, pour atteindre le niveau minimum qui me conviendrait le mieux. Malheureusement, je ne peux pas maintenir ce niveau de travail. Cela prendrait la place d'autres projets que je veux faire.

C'est donc à contrecoeur que j'ai décidé de suspendre mon étude du français pour le moment.

Meilleurs vœux,

Nigel."

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I'm not really surprised. I have a history of throwing myself into things and then deciding that long term, they're just not sustainable .. and then just dropping them. Is that bad? Don't think so. Otherwise I'd be stuck my whole life doing just one thing.

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I asked Annie this afternoon where, in terms of her school-students, she thought I was. She reckoned at AS level (one year into the sixth form). That is roughly the amount of school study I did back in the day.

I shared with her this calculation:

• ten new words a day with almost perfect recall is an additional 3,000 words over a year. That isn't going to make colloquial French speakers effortlessly understandable;


• half an hour of me speaking French to Annie once a week equates to 25 hours a year. Hardly the route to fluency in speaking.

And even this low rate of engagement requires perhaps an hour or so of study a day: working on exercises, checking grammar, looking up words and phrases, reading French text, translating dialogues from English, listening to French broadcasts. Other topics are being neglected. Truly there is no royal road to foreign language competence.

I must say Annie took it well.

----   Here's the translation ----

 A quick review of my plans

Dear Annie,

I look forwards to our fifth lesson this afternoon, but I think that that will be the last one for a while.

This has nothing to do with your excellent teaching! I am impressed by your hard work and preparation - you are always incredibly helpful and sympathique.

Here is what I think. I started these lessons with you for two reasons. Firstly, I wanted to check my own conversational skills (not as good as I thought!). Secondly I wanted to assess how much effort and time would be needed to get to a basic level of spoken competence.

It seems clear that I would need to spend an hour a day, almost every day for at least a year to reach the minimum level I would be pleased with. Unfortunately I can't sustain that level of work. It's taking the place of other projects I want to do.

So reluctantly I have decided to suspend my study of French for the time being.

Best wishes,

Nigel.

Conversations en français

My French tutor

My second (weekly) visit with my new French conversation tutor, Annie, in Glastonbury this afternoon. I chose this article from Le Monde to discuss: the reaction of the « foulards rouges » (red scarfs) against the violence and looting associated with a « gilets jaunes » movement which continues to maintain its strength across France into the new year.

We talked about that for quite a bit - I can basically follow her slightly-slowed-down idiomatic French. I mentioned that I had read Michel Houellebecq's novel 'Submission' in translation but I really wished I could read it in the original French, not least because his latest novel, Sérotonine (which is said to accurately diagnose the social malaise underpinning the revolt of 'peripheral France'), won't be available in English until the Autumn.

I reviewed 'Submission' a year ago.

Amazon link

The problem is that with a literary novel, even an accurate translation of the words will fail to capture the wealth of cultural allusions which underpin the essential quality of the work for a native speaker.

Annie agreed, and as homework suggested I order 'Maigret' and read that: several times.

The Avalon Marshes

Clare and myself visited the Avalon Marshes today, a wetland nature reserve close to Glastonbury. The signs said there were otters: Clare's eyes took on that thousand-yard stare as she scanned expanses of water looking for evidence. Other signs also warned of ticks bearing Lyme disease: after carefully tucking my trousers into my socks, my eyes took on that cross-eyed look as they scanned the foliage for spherical bloated creatures with sharp, hangy-on claws.

What we did see were dragonflies, in red and blue, and of a size not seen since the Carboniferous.

Clare takes in 'nature'

Your author: ".. WiFi .. please .. soon .. ."

As a memento of the day, Clare bought a new plant, a kind of super-Christmas-tree for the upcoming season. Here's a picture of the new plant and another of the toiling worker.

The New Plant - Xmas lights to come

The new plant needs good earth

Shame about the old plant, the Xmas tree from last year. With its sparse, straggly branches it has failed to pass muster. It now languishes, derooted and waiting to die, in a space just behind where the worker toils above.

RSPB Ham Wall

Out and about at Ham Wall this morning.

The author with Glastonbury Tor

Clare fronting the wetlands

Swans relaxing in the grass