Please form a wide queue

Ah, the long summer holidays. It’s easy to feel nostalgic about them in the midst of winter, yet realistically by the time we got to Greenbelt at August bank holiday I think we were all pretty exhausted! The theme of Greenbelt 2024 was “Dream on” which implied that some sort of sleep should happen prior to the dreaming? One of the things that did happen (unlike last year) was that we remembered to take our first night’s dinner out of the freezer to take with us. And we noticed just in time that we’d packed rum instead of wine. I’d call that success!

The bike trailer we’d flat-packed in the van helped with our trips from the car park to our camping spot; down in a hollow along with the friends we camp with each year. Pitching camp was relatively uneventful – we spotted the ants nest just in time, and we strategically pegged the event shelter down mid-way through putting it up, as the wind was rising. Our first night’s dinner was rehydrated with some wine (would have tasted a little odd with rum…!) and as the bottle was open it would have been rude not to have a glass, especially as the water coming from the standpipes around camp was still cloudy. Washing up complete, we wandered into the festival, stopped to chat to a friend (and inadvertently started a queue behind us – these Greenbelters are frightfully British!) and signed up the kids for a skateboarding lesson the next morning (receiving a confirmation email from an ominously-named company called “waiver forever”).

The kids spotted a “Mr Whippy” which we politely declined, explaining at those prices it possibly should be renamed “Mr Whip-round” and instead picking up the staples of bread, eggs and milk from the Milk and Honey store on the way back to the tent. What more could you ask for? Honey maybe? It was getting dark and there were warnings of very strong winds at 4am, so we opened the vents of our event shelter to allow the wind to pass through and settled down to look at the programme. This year I didn’t feel the need to fill my brain with more stuff, so I made a conscious decision to seek out things that would make my heart glad and my soul sing. Chocolate happened to be one of those things, so we consumed some, checked our guy ropes and hunkered down for a windy night.

At 2am I popped out to a portaloo. It was damp and misty outside, but there was an incredible calm. Four hours later it was a different story – the wind in the trees sounded like waves on a rocky shore, the slapping canvas of tents like sails torn asunder. A trip to the portaloo was like sitting on an air bidet… if Dyson made portaloos! Add in the occasional cry from a panicked parent as their child turned into a kite and… OK, I made up that last bit, but it was pretty gusty and at 0630 there were still another couple of hours of high winds to go. We were joined for breakfast by a friend who regaled us with tales of a volunteer left stranded without a tent, but who had been welcomed by others. Our only casualty happened during breakfast, when our lantern crashed down from the top of the shelter into the frying pan of eggs… we were OK with that!

The festival took a while to open whilst they waited for winds to quieten (alas, no skateboarding for the kids!), but eventually we were slowly let in with with the words “please form a wide queue”; the tone of Greenbelt being set with those very words. Be prepared to slow down. Be prepared to stand alongside others. The kids area didn’t open until late in the morning as branches had come down in that area overnight and ironically the Hope and Anchor venue didn’t open for the whole day – strange, because generally two things you need in windy weather are hope and an anchor! Nevertheless, we still found some great stuff – SamSam Bubbleman fusing art and science with his deep understanding of fluid dynamics in a soap bubble show, a picnic lunch accompanied by Martyn Joseph, and then onto a session led by someone who’s collecting old Welsh hymns and augmenting them.

In my head, I kind of pictured a Feet Fall Heavy kind of vibe (Kill it Kid’s album where they sampled Alan Lomax – an American ethnomusicologist who worked to collect and preserve American and British folk music). However, Lleuwen had more of an experimental approach, taking ancient recordings, then layering random drum and bass beats and other sounds, sometimes in different keys or time signatures. I appreciated the sentiment, but the execution of creating a soundscape rather than a piece of music was a bit out there for me. Blue Nun called and my father in law took our youngest to the bar with him, announcing to the bar staff that this would be our youngest’s first time ordering at a bar. To which our youngest interjected “no it isn’t”… left a pause long enough to seed doubt… then finished “only joking!”. My order was a Level Head beer, which ironically came with a convex head.

Our quest for art to bring joy to the soul continued with Arthur the Juggler who had great talent, patter and some of the best diabolo skills I’ve seen. I’m very rarely moved to tears by art, but his routine had me welling up slightly (and no, the Level Head hadn’t been a strong beer!). We then got a chance to have a go at some of the circus skills and I was determined to rekindle the muscle memory of plate spinning from my youth. The only problem I had was that once people could see I could get plates started, I ended up getting so many plates spinning for others that I didn’t have time to focus on my own plates. Deep. After some clay modelling with the kids and some comfortable, familiar, yet moving storytelling from the wonderful Martyn Joseph, we returned to camp for some swift fajitas before dropping our oldest to “late night village”. It might be a slight misnomer as it finished at 21:15… but that was late enough for our child, who returned to camp at 21:40, buzzing, yet confused why we were also going to bed!

Wind the first night. Rain the second… and rain continued to be the order of the day on Saturday. It was tricky staying dry and quiet in the morning as we hadn’t paid for the Tardis add-on to the event shelter, and we’d forgotten to buy eggs the previous evening, so breakfast was healthy peppers, mushrooms and mange tout on toast. We overheard a conspiratorial whisper from our eldest saying “I’ll save my yawns for when Mummy and Daddy aren’t looking so that I can go again tonight” which we chose to ignore and instead I popped into the festival before the others to go to a talk on AI by Professor Beth Singler. I’d missed her talk last year, plus a lot happens in a year with AI.

She describes herself as a digital and cultural anthropologist, so if AI is an onion, she focuses on the outer layer – on how we understand it, on how we interact with it and who is shaping that narrative. You can get a flavour of what she talked about on her website, but it was a rich exploration of where religion and AI intersect – the ethics of it, the responsibilities we have in using the tools built upon this tech, whether there can be spiritual aspects to AI. So some pretty existential questions – once again, a hugely important conversation to have, but I still wonder if we’ve got enough people talking about AI in the right way. It’s ever more pervasive, and with it comes huge costs. I’ve talked in other blog posts about the dabbling that I’m doing to keep on top of it – but do I really want to be part of this machine? I can see that there are / could be useful applications of the tech within churches… summarisation, translation, transcription and reframing of talks from services to make them more accessible… but what about other uses that stray into slightly more questionable territory – re-telling the parables from the bible in 21st century situations? Generating suggestions for prayer based on whatever is in the news (how many times have we looked at bad news and gone “I don’t know how to start praying about this”?)? Every day we make ethical decisions about how eco-friendly we are in our routines, which retailers we shop with etc… our use of AI is just as important a decision to make.

After wandering in the rain with no phone signal, I found the rest of the family in the “Table” venue, listening to conversations around hosting refugees. One of the challenges they spoke of was how to communicate with someone when English isn’t their first language and you don’t speak theirs… well, that is indeed a place where AI is of use.

The highlight of the rest of the day (aside from Lucy Lost It – a top notch entertainer who kept our kids captivated with comedy magic full of joy and wonder) was Lunatraktors who sung songs of socialist resistance fusing Celtic folk influences with funk and vocal improvisation. Their sound emerged from a place of nothing – asking a question of how you make music when the electrics go out, so they sung and used their hands for rhythm. Since then they’ve added a third band member (Synthia… a synthesiser!) and some physical percussion, but their folk sound is still beautifully unique. They announced up front that they were proudly pagan and non-binary and were surprised at the warm and open reception Greenbelt gave them. When their announcement of a song based on the opening chapter of Ecclesiastes elicited a whoop from the crowd, they said they’d consider playing for more Christians in the future! I love Greenbelt. Be prepared to stand alongside others.

Kiri and I escaped at this stage to a panel conversation about living in community with others; the dreams versus the reality. Several models of Christian community were represented and I appreciated the candour with which they spoke – one monk talked about gold coming from living with those we disagree with… and that there is no luxury of walking away if you’re sharing marmalade. Folk from the dispersed Iona community talked about the vows they make to hold each other accountable in each others’ use of money, time and their drive for social justice. They key uniting factor in all of their approaches was having a shared rule of life and explicit boundaries.

Standing half in the marquee for this talk, hood up against the continued rain, my drive and motivation for more content was drying up as everything was still so wet. So we had a quick heads together for a plan and chose to head back to camp for tea. By the time the hot dogs were done, the sun was out, so the four of us sat outside together. I was a little early delivering our eldest to the late night village, so we wandered round the festival as evening fell; bright lights reflected in wide eyes at the awe and wonder and the festivals location “between endless fields”.

And then it was Sunday – in order to get to the communion service on time, we made packed lunches and chose to leave the washing up until later. This year the focus was on refugees and we had a live video link with a small group of Christians in Bethlehem. We were told that for communion there was enough bread for every group to have half a loaf… but we had to distribute it ourselves. How do you do that in a crowd of thousands? Cue loaves flying through the air, trying to make sure every huddle of picnic blankets and chairs had one. And then every settled group was asked to pick up all of their things and move a few metres. We’d only settled there half an hour earlier, but it was surprisingly irritating to have to move with a mass of other people… making sure we had all our things (including the kids!) and then find a new place to settle. What an incredibly powerful illustration of the upheaval of mandated movement.

Queuing was the order of the afternoon. We’d heard rumours that some of the best coffee in the festival could be found in the Orchard so Kiri’s parents went to queue, whilst the rest of us chatted about coppicing with a guy who was turning wood on a pole lathe. The coffee was abandoned as the queue was too long so we found a shorter queue for less exciting coffee, then the kids joined a queue to try some aerial circus skills. This turned out to be a very slow moving queue. We had a picnic in the queue. Kiri and her Mum headed off for an art walk. Kiri’s Dad headed off to a talk. We’d been queuing for 45 minutes by now and our youngest declared a need for the toilet! It’s testament to the safety of Greenbelt that I felt able to leave our oldest queuing whilst the needs of our youngest were met… and similarly half an hour later (told you it was a long queue!) I was left with a very chatty 6 year old boy called Samuel whose favourite number sentence was “13 minus 20 is minus 7”.

By the time we reached the front of the queue, Kiri had returned, so I headed off to grab a spot in Canopy in preparation for Chris Read. The sound check was almost part of the performance – a musical, kind-hearted conversation with the guy on sound desk, then his set provided a glimpse into his Edinburgh Fringe musical about life as a session musician. Both Chris (and Harry who popped up as a special guest) have a lovely gentle warmth in their comedy, with “throwaway” comments such as “this song was originally called… well, actually it’s still called…” delivered with such credibility that maybe they are indeed throwaway. And I love the inspiration for their songs – Chris was asked by someone in child care “how much does your son know about God?” which led him to write a song “my son knows so much more about God than me”.

After some more queuing (this time fruitless – we didn’t get into Playhouse), and some time making little woollen pom poms, we spent a beautifully chilled time listening to new poems from the wonderful Harry Baker. I left early to queue for pizza that would be ready in time for the end of the session… and then queued for chicken for Kiri… and then queued for some exciting Sri Lankan food for me, which was so visually-appealing with its flourescent minty sauce on top that our youngest exclaimed “wait, is that real life food?”. It was indeed, and very tasty at that. It was at this stage that Kiri had a panic – where was her phone? She went off to look for it, but without any joy – what hope is there of recovering a phone at a festival? Even a festival like Greenbelt? I just about managed to get phone signal and called it… it rang… and then was answered. By the lost property folk – someone had found it and handed it in within 19 minutes of it being lost. That’s Greenbelt for you!

We dropped our eldest off at late night village, then decided to stay in the festival so our youngest could experience some of the awe and wonder appreciated by number 1 the previous night. Kiri geeked out on some hazel hurdles and the lights had the same effect as the previous night, but on our other child, however it was decidedly chilly, so we retreated to Canopy once again (I’ve hardly been there in previous festivals, yet that’s the venue we spent most time in this year!) as it was slightly warmer. We were treated to a small folk group who happened to be doing a cover of Teenage Dirtbag. So there we go. Oh, but talking of dirt, when we got back to the tent our decision to leave the washing up that morning came back to bite us. Washing up in the dark is no fun. Boo!

As is often the way with Greenbelt, our final night resulted in more of a lie-in than we normally get at home, with the kids emerging at around 7am. After breakfast the kids were off playing whilst we started to strike camp. As we did, we ended up in a very interesting conversation with the others we camp with as to why we pray. Do we have an interventionist God… and if not, why do we pray – what is it that we think happens? Do other people here our prayers and seek to answer them? Are they prompted to answer by God? Or is it about relationship – slowly getting revelation as to who God is, so we perhaps see the world through a different lens? Does prayer change the person who’s praying?

Reeling from far too much brain activity that early in the morning, we were interrupted by our eldest saying they’d lost a pin badge somewhere in the field. This is a field of long grass. Where the kids had been covering significant distance in their playing. Not quite needle in a haystack territory, but close. A kind camper nearby offered theirs, but we said no… and instead said we’d pray. So we did. Kiri returned from taking a load of our stuff to the van and prayed too. And the back of the pin badge was found (a fair way from our tents)… followed shortly by the badge. No detectorists were involved in the finding. I’m stilling chewing over what happened there.

The campsite shut at 12pm. We went through the gate at 11:58, much to the concern of our eldest, who questioned what might happen if we didn’t get out on time. I think the answer would have been that we would have had a shorter queue out of the car park! However, we passed time eating our lunch in the van, before an uneventful journey home where the kids napped.

So that’s Greenbelt done for another year. That temporary gathering where we form wide queues. Where we stand resolute against the wind. Where we embrace mixing with “other” and having our perceptions challenged. Where we acknowledge our kids probably know more about God than us. Where the lost is found. Where we seek that which will warm the heart, that which feeds the soul and that which causes our eyes to widen in wonder. And maybe, just maybe, we can bring some of that mindset back into our everyday lives.