Skip to main content

Wilderness Festival - Sleepless With Stoicism

  I've just done my first festival proper with My Tutu Went AWOL. Wilderness.  I sold a book to Tom 'The Idler' Hodgkinson, who I revere.  As for the festival itself, wandering around I overheard one of the security guards say, 'The only thing posher would be a cheese and wine party...'
  Except when you borrow a tent sight unseen from a mate and it turns out to be a mountain tent of tininess.
  Luckily, I went to the festival with Grace Barry-Tait, the superb singer and host.  She knows the festival build team.  A buggy arrived at the Yellow Area, driven by Liselle, who toted Grace and me with our stuff to Crew Camping. Liselle peered at my tent from under her vast curls. 'It's very small.  But I'm sure you'll get into it, don't worry.  Let's...' Grab a rubber mallet, ignore the instructions, and get on with it. 'There.  Except...we'll wait for Jack to give his opinion.  He's in the shower.'
  Jackson James Purcell emerged from the shower, wearing a towel. A face-swap of the young Brando and the young Sinatra, tall, with a boxer's build and gait, he took one look at the tent. 'It's a nylon cat's coffin.  Anything else you need to know?  Right.  How are you with stoicism?'

  Sleepless, apparently.

  Got home to a letter about Tutu.  ​'In spite of itself, your book has soul...'



  Here we are performing with Jackson...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Some Favourite Books - But Please don't Lesbify Dame Agatha's Denouements

  I'm too tired to read anything new so have been round the libraries taking out my default-setting books to read over Christmas. These include:    The Pursuit of Love , Nancy Mitford.   The blood-stained entrenching tool displayed above the fireplace, child-hunting over Shenley Common, Jassy traumatising the local children telling them the facts of life.  The scene at the Gare du Nord where Linda sits on her luggage to cry and meets Fabrice always takes me back to the first reading of the novel, sitting wrapped in my Welsh Tweed shawl, in a tiny bedroom on the eighteenth floor of a high-rise in Kennington.   The Pursuit of Love is romantic, hilarious and bleakly eccentric.    Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady , Florence King. When I entertained troops on the American base in Kandahar, four South Carolina army captains made me an Honorary Southern Belle. Madame Galina, they said, in all her unreasonable, high-blooded,...

My Mate Jamie-Ray Hartshorne

     I've been noticing that alongside photos of Jamie-Ray being a lead in Altar Boys , creating Change My Body UK TM , working the door at Freedom - and clearly asking people passing by wherever that rockpool may be to snap a double-bicep - this sort of thing is cropping up on his social media:   We're in The Diner, Jamestown Road, Camden.  He's between tour dates of  The Bodyguard,  and meetings to discuss sportswear and creatine endorsements.  The latter, he says, being all about making his product better.   Between sips of his peanut butter milkshake (he's allowing himself dairy today in my honour - I don't quite know how to take that) he says in his soft Brum, 'I've signed up for a major Muay Thai event in Thailand next February.  I'm going up against one of the Thai fighters.  That's the only real way to gain any respect in the fighting world.  That's why you've been noticing the combat photos.  I...

Where do Babies Come From? How we Learn about Sex...Book Just Launched on Amazon Kindle

                                                                      Click to buy the book 'My spoken material is about the facts of life,'  I was explaining to the Mother Superior.  'I've been asking people what they were told, how they were told it and did they ask questions. Terribly funny...'    During my Where do Babies Come From? talk at the Metrodeco CafĂ©, Brighton, a  superfluity of nuns stopped at the window to listen.  In the street later that week one of them glided up and said how much they had enjoyed hearing me sing.  ' And we wonder, might you please sing something for our charity evening?' I said, of course, sister.   The nun nodded.  'That's very good to hear.  But just to correct you: not sister - but  Mother  Superior.' She then ...