Weirdness & Lunacy: Dispatches from The Garden

I wake abruptly to a ringing phone. A familiar voice on the line: “This is your Sunday morning wake up call. Come to the hay bales. We are about to take acid.”

The path that led to this most earnest of Sunday traditions involves the energies of many. With time and practise, the ceremony has been honed to perfection by a devoted - some would say obsessive - collection of individuals. The quest? To PLAY. (And of course To WIN.)  

Two teams roughly cleaved by various allegiances. One drop of liquid acid each to be administered publicly to great adulation. Preferably at dawn.

The first challenge is issued. It’s a fairly easy one – the man who has issued it certainly has a vested interest – as does the team member who manages to win the first easy 5 points: for obtaining and delivering a pack of king skins.

As the first waves LSD crawl in from the edges, those in the tent take on a warm glow, a humming sense of togetherness. We will remain in this group – intentionally or not – for the day. Roaming the playground playing the games, winning points, moving as a stretched and hectic unit all with the same intent. This is us, we will triumph. We have triumphed. 

First team to get Shiv’s wristband from her sleeping wrist. First team to bring Shiv herself to the group. First team to collectively summit the pyramid of haybales. First person to bring group Bloody Mary’s. (50 points for ice.)

Our photographer snaps us, capturing the moments forever. But really they are all indelibly etched. Those lines trace way back now. Connecting so many.

I have long valued the art of playing that has been honed in the garden. It’s shaped me and my friends, it’s shaped our friendships and the way we lead our lives. The realisation that everything is right. The acceptance that anything is possible. The knowledge that you make your own luck. The beauty that good people find and reflect and make each other.

Another wave of something hits. Perhaps it’s the group re-load we voted on earlier – or the crystals we just sprinkled into our icy drinks. As the day ages, pan out to widescreen, we can see a lake, dragon-fly at its centre. Pan further still you’ll see our famous landmarks. The undulating ground that teams with memories.

I think this will be my 12^th SGP. It’s not a festival. It’s a part of life. Integral to the people I have come to know as family. It’s the place at which we all physically (and psychedelically) connect. This connectivity is present year round now. I can feel it. Love which stretches across time zones, flies over oceans unsaid. Universally felt.

Secret Garden Party is emblematic of what connects us – but it’s also helped us to learn what that is - this ever-expanding momentum of the most inspiring people: love, freedom, awesomeness. Stupidity, recklessness, hilarity. Wildness, weirdness, a fuck-it seizing of the day. And that deep knowledge that we are all in it together. Dress as your best self. Truly shine – cause you do. And let it all hang out. This is the place where we are truly free.

Writing this now it is dawning on me how unbelievably lucky we all are to have been at this epicentre – contributing to this utterly magical nebula of vibes. So here we go, with love and thanks, to send her off with a fucking bang.

Peace all the way out… 

While we drive through the Yorkshire Dales

While we drive through the Yorkshire Dales,

Me, carsick in the back,

We marry.

I wear a dress as soft and dramatic as a limestone ledge.

I hold a field of poppies.

Luminous against the hill.

We build a house a day.

We have children, one curly and dark like you,

With your grasp of logic and and spatial sense.

The other slightly strange and obsessed with words.

They grow. Quickly actually,

While we wheel through a dizzying buffet of careers,

Some lucrative, successful, ending in glossy hair

BBQs, dogs, I glimpse a pool.

Others are only visible through a council estate window,

Or don’t exist at all and are just Welfare State thoughts.

Dancefloors and endless weekends.

And all the while your mother points out cream tea opportunities,

And you snooze, slack-jawed, unaware of

the soft, luminous limestone dress in my head.

Two Girls in English Moonlight Place a Bet

“OK I’m ready. Don’t move - I’m starting now.”

We look at the moon. I try not to breathe. Every exhale is a chair dragged across a room. My hair falls across my shoulders, a cacophony.

I can hear Clare’s mind throbbing like a dancefloor. The lawn creaks. The stars feedback like live, unconnected cables.

A full minute passes in darkness. He lifts his head to signify the end of the test.

Emptying my lungs, I am all noise. Clare takes a grateful rasp on her cigarette.

“What do you think the reading was? How many decibels are you?”

The answer makes no difference. Clare won a million pounds.

The Beginning, The Build and Wedding Number One

It's a Wednesday in May two days before I am due to get married. I'm sitting in the waiting room of Bodysense hastily looking for before and after pictures to reassure me that this spray tan will make me look even more utterly perfect and flawless for my imminent three day wedding. Unfortunately I have stumbled upon the absolutely damning reviews. This is the spray tan that my sister is at that very moment being daubed in in the broom cupboard down the hall.

'Awful'. Says the first review, (no stars). 'DO NOT USE! Only recommend to your worst enemy'. (No stars). 'Orange, streaky, ruined my wedding' says the last one I have time to read before the therapist returns with my sister and bridesmaid who is looking amazing having been recently sprayed with a tint they call 'Belgian Chocolate'.

After my other sister is coated in a sticky layer of chocolate with a dash of 'Lusciously Dark', I pad, shaking, through to the broom cupboard to stand against the darkly stained wall, eyes suspiciously squinted, arms cactus stiff, ready to be hosed down with cold paint.

Once the deed is done, the beautician having escaped with her life, we swagger off smug, trying hard to walk without actually moving, heads rotating like olive-skinned terminators, arms like rifles floating away from our bodies, aimed haphazardly.

For the last what, month? 2 months? 6 months? My mind, conversation and actions have been focused around this 3 day point, this glowing, pulsating, living-but-not-quite-real crystal in my future towards which I advance. It began as a bit of a joke: my obsession with talking-thinking-dreaming about The Wedding. 'Let's Get You Married!' said a pull out wedding guide my mother joke-thrust into my hands.

Table centres and place names and flowers, garters and guests, dresses and diets and honeymoons and something called wedding favours and cakes like mansions and all so very very un-me. I clam up when people ask me what my colour scheme is. Make vague noises when asked about table runners and confetti.

So jokingly I become this parody of a wedding-obsessed bride.... All yoga and green smoothies, body brushing and secret pinterest pages covered in glittery dresses and canapes..... Until, suddenly I actually am that girl, and all I want to talk about is my dress and show people pictures of my fiancé - and insist on calling him my fiancé so they'll ask about the wedding so I can tell them the ALL about the plans.

Except our wedding is not 'normal'. It's not the wedding you read about in a magazine, one that's over in 10 hours and all you have to do is show up in a big dress and drop £25 grand on a venue and caterers. Of course it couldn't be normal. Not when Andy (the hubcap) does what he does - which you all know is make big shiny parties. Design, build and perfect spectacular things in which people have the time of their lives. How could it ever be normal? It was set in a garden and made possible by the people that have been there since before the beginning - my mother and father.

They were the hosts. They were the workers, the chiefs, the bosses, the orchestrators, the facilitators, the wedding cake makers, the support, the chefs. The people who lost sleep over whether we should eat blinis or oat cakes. The team with which we planned everything, the pair who rolled up their sleeves and were phased by nothing. The winners who said YES to a three day party in their garden (and inevitably - their home - sorry guys). The pair who flinched at nothing, even the 200 strong guest list. The people who made us believe it was possible to do everything ourselves and the people who hopefully you met and raised a glass with and marvelled at just how fucking AMAZING they are. They opened their home to our collection of colourful ragamuffins, our hoard of festival heroes, our glamour pusses, glittering girls, beer-brewing chefs, muscled, power-tool-wielding chippies, fluffy dawn fairies, soaked, grass-covered kids; and they kept smiling and loving it till the bitter end.

So there was the yoga and dresses and many hours on the phone to my stylist - the one the only Carmen Frock On. And the freaking out about the golden leaves and just how we were going to fit everyone in. There was the EPIC hen do. There was the doing absolutely everything at the last minute. The endless emails about the bar and carbonation techniques and the brewing of the beer after no sleep. The spreadsheets and lists and administrative errors.

Then there was The Crew. Oh the crew, the crew.

The Dream Team.

You guys made it all happen. Not only that, but you distilled the stress. You pulled the tension away from us and absorbed it until we felt not a bit. You allowed us to enjoy the Best Week Of Our Lives which is the Best Present you could ever have given us. 'Thank you' will never cover what we feel.

(NB. At the time of writing, all presents remain unopened in Wales with a little bit of our souls so THANK YOU - individual heartfelt thanks to follow when we make it back there to restore the last, crucial bit of order.)

So, it's Wednesday at midnight and we are all pretty pissed having given up on the non-drinking and are awaiting the arrival of the 2am crew. Dee is still painting the dance floor. Industry and hard work is occurring everywhere. The 2am crew arrive despite being pulled over by the police and having to load 12 huge tables into an already full van. Making the impossible possible has been the theme.

Thursday is megaday. Sue has clocked up over 100 brownies and loaded and unloaded the dishwasher over 50 times. Martin erects a heroic number of bell tents, clears the entrance to the barn so we can block it again and promises to look after babies. Sofas are being fixed then hauled into sofa town. Benches are being made. Jeffrey doesn't put down his power tools for the entire week. The site manager (Your Niece) is in control of every aspect of the build - from the relative minutiae of clearing of the tables after crew meals to the positioning of dancefloors to the levelling of land. Christa is wildly hoovering the Stags Dorm and Onny is making coffee after coffee while Bex strims the shit out of the garden. The quad is lumbering around completely laden with decor and tables and God knows what else. Signs are painted. Flowers are being arranged offsite by my new mother-in-law. Romantic arches are strung together out of hazel collected just moments before by my horticulturalist and her wingman. Leaves are laminated. More brownies are made. Even more ice is bought. Table plans remain unwritten.

The Tagines. 'To tagine' has been made a verb. You gave it a name Jona, Jona and Bex. An entire day and night of cooking and tasting and stirring and chopping - good God the chopping - an absolute marathon: endless sacks of veg, an unbelievable feat by Bex, Jona and Jona, Timbo, Reen and Sue. Stirring the lamb with a spoon half the size of me made by my father in order to stir the pesto he created in our garden shed while I was still a baby. Everywhere, the most meaningful of moments are happening so simultaneously I can't keep up or take it all in.

Thursday - as is traditional - we are separated for the night in preparation for the Friday grand re-union at the alter. Andy tells me this is ridiculous. But it only adds excitement. We do however meet a lot sooner than expected on Friday morning over a table full of unprepared canapes, a nail-biting bride and a huge scrawled list of jobs (to be dished out willy nilly).

Cut to 11am and someone notices me frying pepperoni. My team of wonder women take me away. A glass is put in my hand. Rollers are wound into my hair. Calming scents surround me. My sunshine Laurey gives me a facial and a crystal to clutch while I panic over my vows and whether they will get the music right at the registry office. My darling mother massages my feet and whispers soothing words while she paints my nails, sands away the callouses and scolds me for my lack of foot-care regime. Dee arrives bearing my utterly amazing, gorgeous and magical power ring. The tears begin. They don't actually stop, but rather hover behind every shaking sentence, dammed by my ear to ear grin.

Then - my God - I walk to my very own kitchen (which is completely destroyed by its being forced non-consensually into becoming an industrial kitchen which pumps out meals from dawn to dusk.) Amidst this bombsite of bottles and vegetables, my father is waiting and we make nervous chit chat over barely-sipped bubbles. I keep looking at the clock and biting my nails. "We need to be late." He tells me, a smile on his lips.

He drives me in a four by four to a room full of waiting friends, family, loved ones. As we walk in I can hardly breathe with excitement, love and overwhelming gratitude.

And speaking the words I have heard so many times in films, as I gaze into the brown eyes of my love, my best friend, my soul mate I can barely - still can't - believe how one girl could be so very lucky, so very blessed.

Saturday is a whole other story folks. So this is TO BE CONTINUED.

All my very best and endless love

Lowri Thomas Ellis Clarke

x

Liars League

Oh I lied, I lied. And I didn't come back did I?

But lying convincingly - isn't that what you do when you are a writer of fiction? Forcing your reader to suspend their disbelief for ten pages. Or an hour. Or a month. Making the world you hold in your head entirely real and moving and heartbreakingly, painfully crystal. I want to take you with me. And THAT is the muscle I am currently trying to work. I will be in touch to suspend your disbelief presently.

Foxy Loxy Is Back

Foxy Loxy is back. I've dragged her purring from the archives.

I got a little carried away for a while. There was an interlude across the Atlantic. An interruption actually. But I feel as if I have returned to myself right now. I feel AWAKE. And, validated as I am by the very typing of these brand new words, I'm thrilled to be commencing forthwith in relaying the latest trials and tribs.

By forthwith I of course mean tomorrow. I can hardly wait.

A Civil Partnership

I am honoured to be able to use this sentence and mean it:

The bride rocked an American apparel lace catsuit. Her g-string and breasts clearly and gorgeously visible. A wrestling belt bisected her torso. Her Mohawk quivered gently as she shivered, teeth chattering in the brisk morning air of Bow.

Her groom stood tall in gold hi-tops, silver spandex legs topped with a white tux. A peach tutu swung about her as she turned to and fro, eyes sparkling at her guests. The sky - a perfect blue-bird blue - had dressed for the occasion. Even the sun had his hat on.

The wedding party made their rag-taggle way towards the registry office. A collection of gender-bending friends (their chosen families) and a confused pet - each carrying a single flower - whooped up Bromley High Street and onto Bow Road.

The staff at the Registry Office smirked.

We filed in to the serious room designed only for waiting, and decorated the stern furniture. The wedding attendant looked slightly nervous. The security guard merely laughed. It did look farcical but actually wasn’t. A universal feeling gripped the room.

Laughter bubbled up into each gullet, threatened to spill from each grinning mouth. The unanimous feeling was reflected on every face: wedding-happy grins smothered us all. Lucky – the ring-bearer and only sausage dog in the room – skipped happily from guest to guest as we awaited the call and we admired each others finery. ‘Nice wig!’ ‘Nice boa!’ ‘Nice tits!’

Periodically Lucky would grow frustrated, snapping at the pink bag attached to his back. The bag contained the ‘rings’ (or lockets, hastily purchased the day before at Spitalfields Market the bride confessed.) Each contained a lock of the others’ hair.

None of us could quite believe we were here.

The wedding attendant stepped finally into the waiting room and opened the double doors. “Will the guests please be seated.” Much guffawing and last-minute introductions, (“Hi hi, yes, I’m with the bride, nice to meet you too!”) and the party cleaved to people the chairs each side of the aisle.

Then, signalling time, the first bars of the wedding song chimed forth and everyone shut the hell up. Warren G’s ‘Regulate’ filled the room. We giggled and nodded our hip hop heads in approval.

“It was a clear black night, a clear white moon Warren G was on the streets, trying to consume…” and, on cue, the gaggle of chosen grooms-men, best men and maids of honour hotstepped smugly up the aisle.

The groom was waiting with tears in her eyes. Then in strutted the bride, bouquet in hand, Mohawk still quivering.

Vows were exchanged. Lockets were exchanged. Tears were shed. Photos snapped. The groom, laryngitis or party husky, said “I will.’ The bride acquiesced also. We cheered. Lucky howled, pleased as punch that his mistress had been made an honest woman.

A poem was read about wings carrying two souls and then we followed the bride into the garden where, grinning further still, she shivered under the perfect blue-bird sky and said, “Let’s go to the pub.”

The Bow Bells was the venue for the wedding breakfast: here platters of chips and two bottles of vintage cava were shared. Pool was played. Jokes were cracked. Arrangements were made for this party and many more. We had to bang on the door to get them to open up for us. “We’ve just got married!” the newly-weds gaily declare. “Happy new… I mean congratulations!” the barman said, wiping sleep from his eyes.

The past was a mirage we’d left far behind. And now they were married, joined together forever.