these days is full of thirtysomethings bringing luxury camper vans and gazebos, folding chairs and yurts. People bring their kids, drink rose wine from a box and there is a long queue at the stall charging £8 for a ‘gourmet’ pie. It makes you nostalgic for the days when you could open a warm Stella, buy a fiver’s worth of hash from a crusty and try to dance to some Dutch techno.
Now ticket-holders are required to show their passport to enter. This means that entering the festival is much like entering the country – you pay a lot of money for a ticket, present your passport and enter, only to find that it’s a small rainy place where everyone has a tiny home and hardly anyone is working.
Sadly there will be no festival in 2012, with Michael Eavis blaming it on there not being enough police available for everyone to have a really good time.
CERNE ABBAS GIANT
DORSET
UFFINGTON WHITE HORSE
OXFORDSHIRE
It’s an odd idea: come to visit something you can’t actually see unless you are 130ft tall. Is anyone that tall? We’re not; not even combined. So unless you are on the world’s highest and most precarious pair of stilts, clinging on for dear life and screaming that you have changed your mind about all this, you’re just not going to see either of these two chalk outline figures very slightly carved out of the grass.
No one is sure if the white horse is even a horse. It might be a dog or a sparrow or something. Intriguingly, the ancient … well, whoever it was who marked out the unidentified creature, left one leg floating away from the rest of his body, rather like Penfold’s eyebrows in Danger Mouse.
And just what it is doing there on the side of a hill is also a bit sketchy. Some historians say it was carved in celebration of King Alfred’s victory over the Danes in AD 871:
‘Nice one, Alfred. So, how do you fancy celebrating?’
‘I want a sodding massive white horse carved into a hill.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
Then there’s that giant. No one would dispute that children love giants – they go ape-shit for them. They are, after all, GIANTS. But aside from the anger, the smashing things etc., the point about giants is that they’re supposed to be more visible than ordinary people, not less. So kids won’t find this giant exciting unless they want their heads examined – which, of course, they might do after they fall off those massive stilts of yours. Honestly, I don’t know why you brought them.
No one knows the reason for the giant’s existence, either, although it might have been carved to annoy Oliver Cromwell who was known to have an aversion to giants with clubs.
But the most interesting thing about the Cerne Abbas Giant is the size of his weapon. A euphemism? You betcha. If you like your giants with huge erect penises, this is certainly the giant for you. On the other hand, in these paranoid times, visiting the Cerne Abbas Giant with children – especially those to whom you are not directly related – is fraught with the distinct possibility that the wrong word could land you on the sex offenders register.
WINDMILL HILL CITY FARM
BRISTOL
As the name suggests, Windmill Hill City Farm is a farm in a city. In other words, it’s a farm to be visited by city people who can’t be bothered to go to the countryside to see a proper one. Beyond that, its slogan is ‘A place where people grow’, demonstrating that they have clearly misunderstood the purpose of a farm.
Continuing the questionable phrasing of its own raison d’être, its mission statement includes: ‘To meet the needs of local people regardless of age, race, sex, disability, and social or economic circumstances’, which surprises anyone who had presumed they would operate a strictly racist admittance policy, sexually harass women upon entry, and make ‘spazmo’ gestures at any working-class children in wheelchairs.
Like many a substitute, however, city farms bear little resemblance to the real thing. First, city farms raise a small number of animals that have been given cuddly names and are lovingly looked after by staff. Real farms, by contrast, produce a multitude of faceless animals to be slaughtered in their thousands by industrial killing machines while humans stand about reading the paper and occasionally pressing the button marked ‘faster’.
To someone who works at a city farm, each animal has personality, each cow has an old-fashioned girl’s name and each chicken, duck or goose is a feathered friend. To a real farmer, each animal has a cost and a sale price, and every chicken is a unit comprising 2.7 kievs and half a can of Whiskas.
Another important difference between city farms and real ones is that city farms welcome visitors. This is in stark contrast to real farms, where no one looks forward to sportswear-draped families scaring the livestock or trampling the crops under impractically shod feet. Turn up at a real farm expecting to tickle the animals and enjoy a home-made scone and you will be as welcome as a turd in the thresher.
One argument in favour of city farmers presented by people who work at city farms – or ‘hippies on benefits’ – is that city farms help people from the inner cities – or ‘chavs’ – to better understand the countryside by pretending it exists in the middle of Bristol. Urban dwellers often lack a connection with the food they eat, but once they have visited a city farm they know that every Starburger or bucket of Popcorn Chicken they eat comes from an animal called Daisy or Henrietta who was happy right up until the moment she was dragged out of her field and slaughtered.
As well as allowing you to feed the fluffy animals who won’t be killed in front of a crowd of terrified primary school children as they should be, city farms also allow you to look at the cows and pigs, enjoy a teacake, and even offer the chance to ‘sponsor’ one of the animals. But to anyone from the country, this idea is a confusing one. Unless you are a vegetarian, you already sponsor animals all the time. ‘Raise this attractive, friendly animal,’ you say to the farmer, ‘and when you have killed it and cut it into bits that I can eat I’ll give you some money for it.’ Looked at in this light, the city farm doesn’t offer much of a bargain: ‘Raise this animal and as long as you never cut it up into anything anyone can eat I’ll give you some money for it.’ See?
THE BAKELITE MUSEUM
WILLITON, SOMERSET
If you like your thermoset phenol formaldehyde resin formed from an elimination reaction of phenol with formaldehyde, then you’ll love the Bakelite Museum.
Set deep in the peaceful Somerset countryside and housed within a historic watermill which used to do less Bakelitey things, the Bakelite Museum is dedicated to everything about the first plastics to be made from synthetic compounds, and features everything you have always wanted to know about electrically non-conductive polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride.
The museum boasts one of the largest collections of vintage plastics in Britain, with exhibits from the inter-war period including hundreds of the domestic items that people now in old or middle-age were once glad to see the back of.
A
