Holding hands

I’m awake at 4.30 and up by 5.

A hazy grey dawn lets in the first streaks of pastel light and we’re promised a rare sunny day as summer slips away into autumn. After the 8.30 trip to nursery, the day is mine. In a trice, I could pack the van and grab the last chance for my annual camping trip North. Or, I could seize what might be the last opportunity of the year to top up on natural vitamin D.

I have a place that I can go to and shut the door behind me and lock it. It’s a semi-wild sprawling place all overgrown after a summer of reluctant neglect – over an acre of weeds, trees and other plants.

Etched into the corners are painstakingly manufactured beds of straggling beans, broccoli, courgettes, beetroot and more. There’s a funny two-storey greenhouse whose upper floor commands the most striking view of our spiky Northern town. I’m often up there early with my morning coffee.

A brief walk away, in the very corner of what many years ago was a wooded area, amidst stone terraces, sits a little house. There are big trees at the back that host squalls of clattering jackdaws. I bought it when I walked away from another life. I stripped it back to the brick and painstaking started building it back up again. What madness? Pipe and slipper time and buffoono takes on yet another impossible task.

Off grid generally refers to places that can’t access conventional gas and electricity. Farms with tired generators long for hook-up. Off grid in a town would mean cutting off the existing supply. What’s the point in that? The point is, that little by little, the people that control the supply, inflict slavery on the ordinary by constantly putting up the prices, all the while awarding themselves grotesque increases in income from the suffering of the ordinary. Even the well-paid are having to chose between eating and heating.

Getting the shitty companies off your back is no joke. I inherited the accounts of the previous owner. Despite telling them in the clearest terms that I didn’t want their gas and electricity, they say that they have the right to charge me a monthly standing order and threaten me endlessly until I give them money for something that I’ve never used or wanted.

Of course, it’s very easy to take it for free from them, with a little bit of underground knowledge and admirably many people do. They are thieves and bullies who use hapless, faceless agents to inflict their usury. Taking free gas and electricity is just one example of the silent non-compliance of the increasingly enraged.

I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to sever all connection with the vile scum. Getting them to take out the gas meter and cap the pipe wasn’t too difficult and only cost me 34 quid. Getting the electricity supply cut off by Electricity North West cost a lot lot more. I watched with satisfaction as they dug a hole on the front street and surrounded the severed cable with a box of resin.

The gift of my engineering apprenticeship keeps on giving. A friend pointed out that the creativity of designing all the systems required for an off-grid house is part of a spiritual awakening. I’d never seen it like that before. I’m enjoying being a builder more than being a doctor.

The soul-sucking paradox of the internet needs careful navigation, but the gift of instructional videos is immense. Oh how I have devoured them: rendering; plastering; welding; wiring; LPG gas; solar systems; plumbing and so many more. There’s still a long way to go but the immense jobs are done and the damp is conquered. The house is an urban farmhouse to the land and as more people start to see what I see, it will all come into its own.

The same creativity needed for such projects runs through the veins of most of the like-minded. In parallel with my engineering apprenticeship, like so many with less than perfect childhoods, I discovered listening to records and oh what a thrill it was. On a three-quarter sized shoddy classical guitar I wore out my fingers learning bar chords, hopelessly unequipped to deal with my mum being in hospital again.

Thus music was a saviour and by some twist of fate, instead of being in the hustling bouncing packed audience when punk smashed its way in, I was in the band on the stage! I thought that my Rock & Roll days were over when I finally qualified for one of the toughest jobs on earth. I was wrong – it was only just beginning as a long sprawling two and a half decade chapter unfolded. First my bands, then my sons’ bands. Gigs, festivals, rehearsals and a drum kit permanently residing in the creative room where many others would have a settee.

Things come and go and that particular chapter has ended. We’ve had a nice string of gigs since March, playing some originals, but mainly Notsensibles. We played at Landed, a lovely little relaxed festival in Wales and took the toddlers. Guess who was up at dawn every day? We were due to play at Solfest at 6:15pm on the Friday. We were doing a Notsensibles set and two of Sam’s blistering bangers from The Strange catalogue. We were well rehearsed – me, Sam Gaz and Tyler. The weather was awful on the Wednesday. So much so, that marquees and stages blew down and Thursday was cancelled. The brilliant crew did spectacularly well, working through the night to redeem the festival and it went ahead despite the ongoing awful weather.

We set off in plenty of time expecting delays, but hadn’t anticipated the snail’s pace crawling two-mile queue that greeted us. Two hours later and we were directed to the crew area. After being left waiting for an hour we finally reached the entrance only to find it muddily impassable. We were then directed back into the same queue for another two hours, ending up far away from the stage.

Everything conspired against us and we missed our slot. We couldn’t get any help getting our gear to the stage so we had to carry it. There was a certain comedy aspect to it. They made us join the long queue for wristbands despite us explaining we were supposed to be playing. The pinnacle was a moron fucktard bouncer refusing to let us across the short cut to the stage. He immediately went onto the cunt register, despite the paradox of him being too thick to understand the concept of the register.

The poor volunteer stewards were run ragged but oh what an epitome of abysmal organisation and fuck-uppery. Gary was devastated and went home. Of course it was nobody’s fault – it was just our lesson. Tyler, Sam and I were philosophical and repaired to the portable cellar of mis en bouteille au chateaux that I’d managed to bring. The day after, Anna arrived. Pete and Glasgow joined us and had us in stitches with their comedy duo antics.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to go and I met up with some lovely people, but there’s a lesson in everything and this one was that never again, would I voluntarily put myself into such a position of abject frustrating misery. My festival-going days have naturally come to an end. No more the mountains of retch-inducing mounds of stenching beer turds in green plastic cupboards and cunt power-trip security wankers who think they’re policing a prison. I’m back to me and my guitar for now, which is fine.

The cycles of the land reflect elsewhere. The ebb and flow of life and the seasons. You have to hang onto nature. Hook into it. See it. Live it. The darkness weaves with the light and oh zut alors what darkness there is under our noses as the protracted genocide continues unabated. We learn more and more about the monsters pulling the strings of the puppets whose lips are all puckered to kiss the same vile arse ring. The trick is to not get bogged down with the darkness that comes through our screens.

We slowly begin to see what’s really going on. People talk about ‘waking up’ when they start to see it. To borrow from Buddhism, waking up occurs in stages, like peeling off successive layers of an onion. My favourite example is the final chapter of Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan. Genaro has successfully stopped the world and keeps seeing ordinary scenes only to realise that they are all phantoms and illusions.

Don Juan says:

‘Only as a warrior can one survive the path of knowledge, because the art of a warrior is to balance the terror of being a man with the wonder of being a man’.

I got despondent for a while, because most of my friendships and social circles dropped away but then I realised it was only onion skins. Nothing on this earth can make others see what you see until their energy is correctly aligned. It’s fine. The trees don’t lie.

In it all there is hope: the kindness of strangers; the smiles of friends; the opening of flowers and the love unconditional between babies and children and those who nurture and protect them.

The little children hold tightly onto their mummies’ and daddies’ and grandparents’ hands. When they’re long grown up, if they’re lucky, they hold the same hands tightly for one last time as those who loved them the most slip away to a better place, leaving their clothes and meaningless possessions behind.