Mudville - Tin Village at the Sunrise Festival

Today's post is from the Sunrise Festival where I worked in the kitchens at the Tin Village, mostly helping run the pizza workshop. Next week I'll be writing up a recipe for that delicious, ubiquitous dish (here baked in hand-made earth ovens) for our Low Carbon Cookbook slot. Right now here is the background . . .

Standing in the camera oscura, a small wooden island in a sea of mud, Sunrise Festival 2012. I'm watching the crowd flow past slowly like a dream. Pennants are flying, pinnacles of tents pointing to the sky. The camera above the room gyrates in a circle around us. A group of small girls who are tracking it from the outside laugh and wave at us inside. We can see you watching us! It's extraordinary how this lens creates a different relationship with everything you see. You treasure it somehow, love the way you can pick out people and the shapes they make that would otherwise be a blur.

Time does that sometimes, acts like a lens. In the madness of the mud, in the struggle to get from place to place you don't notice the beauty of things. The handprints on the wall.

This is a postcard from the Sunrise Festival. Or perhaps it's a letter, a smoky, muddy love letter. It's from a temporary place called Tin Village that appears at festivals sometimes across England: at Sunrise Off-grid, at Tolpuddle, at Glastonbury. It goes up and then it comes down; people come together and then they depart. Something in the way the place is constructed stays however. That's the essence I'm trying to recapture. It was a watershed midsummer (and that's not just the rain). I had been continuously on line for weeks and then for five days I came off. I was offered a lift from Simon, Pete and Georgina from Norwich who wanted to hear about Dark Mountain. And so we talked non-stop about the world in transition, as we headed to the hill and pasture country of the West.

That's one thing festivals do: they break your crystallised patterns, break you open, open you to people you would be unlikely to meet otherwise, make you look at where you are going and where you are coming from. Teach you to receive gifts, as much as give them, take you out of your personal camera oscura and into the field. Perhaps the muddiest field you have ever encountered.

earth oven

Tin Village is an off-grid experiment in community living. It is built by a core crew who put up everything from scratch: the outbuildings, earth ovens, grey waste system, rocket stove kitchen, field shower, permaculture garden. During the festival an additional crew arrive and we work at least four hours a day running the pizza workshop and cafe, which provides the income for the enterprise. Most of us also give workshops (I gave two: one on Herbs for Resilience, based on my book, 52 Flowers That Shook My World - published today! - and another on grassroots communications with a poet from Occupy London called Venus, based on my experiences with this blog and the Transition Free Press). The sessions range from the intellectual and political to the practical and inspirational - from how to get involved with Frack-Off and Diggers 2012 to thatching and foot massage. This year the Village has been co-ordinated by Ian Westmoreland from Transition Heathrow, so there is a strong activist element. It's a lot less fluffy and spiritual than last year, and there is something exciting about this set of progressive and environmental groups coming together in one place, working alongside each other, swapping stories, making links. Last year I felt on the edge - everything was more distant, more polite. This year I am in the thick of things.

Where we meet is around the fires, the two pizza ovens and the four rockets stoves in the kitchen run by Harry from the Kitchen Collective. The tasks at hand first appear insurrmountable. At our pre-Festival meeting around the camp fire we put our hands up for camp duties and write our names on a rota. Then the rain began to fall. A rain that will last all weekend and turn the whole village into a quagmire, put out the fires, soak the carpets, drench ourselves, dampen the firewood, dampen everything - except our spirits.

Maybe it's because I have a warrior heart that I love the spirit of this camp. Not warrior in the sense of killing and fighting, but in the sense of a people coming together in resilience, not serving their own interests, but doing their own thing impeccably, which turns out to be everyone else's: acting collectively, sharing skills, knowledge, resources. The rain washed away the rota, so we let it go. Looking from the outside from the position of contol, running a temporary working community without a plan or leadership seems impossible, but when we got down to it everything self-organised.

I went to all kinds of music events during the weekend, danced, chanted at sunset, drank chai, listened to some great talks at the Green Dome - Mark Boyle, Maddy Harland, Theo Simon - spoke with low carbon cooks and Transitioners from all over the county, had a lovely meal with fellow reporter Ann and her family in their tipi, but I kept feeling pulled towards the home station of the Village.

Something there made sense in a way that a lot of the festival stuff, which is centered around entertainment did not. That floated away, the stuff we did for real stayed. The physical work - making dough, digging ditches, washing mountains of dishes, collecting plants in the rain, staggering across the field in my mud-encased boots, keeping the tiny tent dry for sleeping, talking to strangers who don't feel like strangers - remained in my memory. It felt like the kernels of coloured corn that Ann gave me for Mark. Seeds for the future.

rocket stove

I'm writing this midsummer postcard in hindsight. I pocketed those seeds and now the corn is growing in our garden six weeks later. It's now Lughnasa, the traditional time of the harvest and gathering. Tin Village came and went and yet the essence of it still flourishes. Some of the crew are coming to the Uncivilisation Festival this month, and there will be a Tin Village at Sunrise Off-Grid too (though a slightly smaller version). I wished I could have stayed and helped dismantle the camp but Simon and the East Anglia crew were heading back that Monday. I would have liked to have had that experience, got to know everyone more, as well as feeling I had played my part in the hard task of construction.

Sometimes you have to go off-line, off-grid, out of your comfort zones, to get a sense of what is possible. I know now when push comes to shove people can work together in hard conditions and flourish. And when they do something beautiful can happen that you would not expect if you judged everything from the way things appear, from the outside. The people who will make the future work are not the people you think: the control people, the shiny people, the spiritual people. They are the activist people, smart, funny, edgy, generous, friendly, warrior-hearted. The people who are not afraid of the mud. Who are not afraid of the earth or each other, and who can still make a fire, come what may.

Sometimes you wait a long time for the story to make sense. I had a seminal moment when the sun finally came out at the end of the weekend and everyone was going home. I found a chair to sit in and put my face happily in the warmth and the light (at last!) and heard a girl's voice singing: I wanna see the sun, I wanna see the sun (at least that's what I thought she was saying).

"This is it!" I cried. "I wonder what CD that's from?" and went into the tent to find a real girl singing the song, and a familiar figure taking photographs.

"Aren't you the person who shot Transition 2.0?" I asked her when the set was finished. "Didn't we meet in Liverpool?"

"Yes," she said, "And this is Rebecca Mayes. She found an impromptu slot here and I said we just had to have the Transition song!"

"Oh," I laughed."That's where I've heard it before!"

You think the sun is a star, operating outside of us in a scientific impersonal way, but it's not. It is in all things. It's a creative, mysterious, self-organised. connective intelligence that operates through everything on earth. Many strands and shapes interlocking and working for the whole. It works through our hearts and our fiery spirits and we can get a sense of its extraordinary organisation when we break out of the camera oscura of our minds and get into the field. When we trust the people we are working with, when we let go of control and enter the collective. We have been kept seperate for aeons at the behest of forces that have nothing to do with right relations on earth. It's time we got back together again. It's time we got back into relationship.

Sometimes we get that chance. Now is the time.

Images: mud prints on the camera oscura; constructing Tin Village (Heather); Tom and the pizza ovens; workshop blackboard; Transition rocket stove workshops; permaculture no dig garden outside the Green Dome; the stone circle

Treehouse Festival: A demonstration of alternative lifestyle

It's the third day of The Treehouse Festival, during which we've been experiencing communal living and pondering and discussing everything from religion to ant farms.

Each morning we have a fun activity (like yesterday's trip to the beach) and each afternoon we have a seminar/talk. Monday's was from professor Corinne Le Quéré, director of the Tyndall Centre at the UEA. It was on the (broad!) subject of climate change. She reminded us of the overwhelming evidence of global warming, it's causes (including anthropogenic greenhouse gases), and the effect that that it is having on extreme weather events and changing ecosystems.

What I found fascinating, however, was where this all points; what does the future hold? Yes, her predictions suggest increases in consumption (and therefore carbon emissions) in the short term, but the further future is a lot less predictable than anyone can really reasonable assume, and depends so much on how we choose to live our lives over the next few decades. She showed a graph of world population over the past 3000 years, and although exact population was not know for much of that, one thing is clear, and that is that we have very suddenly had an increase in population. We are in a transition already, between a sparsely populated world to a denser one. Many things will have to change for us to support our population, whether we do it consciously or not!

Although Corinne was talking in terms of technological fixes, I was painting my own idea of corrective measures. They were mostly tackling behavioural change: a renewed respect for nature, lifestyle changes that are more about local cooperative community than keeping up with the Jones's, and ceasing the distribution of absurd subsidies for our highest polluting industries.

I'm glad that The Treehouse Festival can give such an idea of the lifestyle possibilities that will lead to a more sustainable future, whilst continuing to be an open and fun environment for those who attend!

You don't have to be mad to be a transitioner but it helps

This politically incorrect statement used to be around every office in the '90s in the form of 'You don't have to be mad to work here but it helps'. I was out with my mother shopping in Peterborough and was surprised at how friendly everyone was and how many people she knew. It then dawned on me that she didn't know any of them and this was an aspect of her dementia. I have since heard of other neurological conditions with a similar outcome. But why do you have to have some kind of brain impediment before you will smile and say hello to someone you do not know?

Living transitionally means you may behave in ways that look a little odd. You may ask to borrow something that is really cheap to buy such as a cake tin. If you are cycling places then you tend to arrive slightly sweaty and multi-layered. You might eat strange things in the lunch break such as last nights leftovers. The other day I walked round the office asking if anyone was driving to our headquarters and felt rather embarrassed as people looked me up and down in wonderment at my lack of transport. 'Is she too poor to have a car?' 'Perhaps she has something wrong with her and is not allowed to drive'. Our company has now joined liftshare which means you can log on and find someone else going on the same journey and cadge a lift. Its kind of like a computerized hitchhiking with the knowledge that the person works for the same people as you.

You may also look generally poor by not flying abroad on holiday or buying the latest flat screen TV. So as well as being odd you will be poor and odd thereby lowering your status further.

However you will be oblivious of all this because you will be having such a good time connecting with people you share lifts, food and cake tins with. Different things will be important to you, for example I nearly crashed my car the other day ( yes I still have one) because every year I decorate the pine tree on the puppet theatre roundabout with secondhand baubles. This year I drove past looking for a place to park when I saw that someone else had already done it! I threw my head back with laughter! I have created a TRADITION.

Oh and the photograph? I just googled 'baubles' to look for someone who looked stranger than me and it didn't take long.

Don't read this if you think I might be giving you a present

So its Christmas time and I have been trying as usual to buy low carbon presents without alienating too many people. I think that Jesus would not want us to celebrate his birthday by destroying the planet that he spent all week (and possibly longer) making.

A few months ago I had all these amazing ideas for presents but with only a few days to go I am panicking slightly as not everything has quite worked out. Somethings I was going to make I never really did make and ended up on facebook playing scrabble instead. Other things didnt really turn out as they should have because they involved such random processes as boiling knitting in a washing machine. On the up side I have a new girlfriend and I decided to make her a scarf out of all the wool I had left over from various projects. You can see the result here. I am very pleased with it and she is buying me a ticket for the pantomime which I am very much looking forward to.

My brother specifically asked for a clock radio so I shall be buying that. Dad is getting a new jumper. My friends who are less specific in their requests are mostly getting the sloe vodka I made after I met Charlotte and Mark for the weekend and we collected sloes. Some other people will get crab apple jelly. At work I usually go round giving out fudge that I buy from the market. It is actually made on the market so low food miles!

I don't really do cards and I would like to say that this is to save trees or that I give the money to charity but the truth is I just can't be bothered. I don't actually see the point in giving a card to someone I will see so I have decided to send emails to anyone I won't see and tell them something that I have appreciated about them that year. I got the idea from a friend of mine who recently had a leaving do for work and said it was like being at his own funeral and hearing nice stuff about you but without having to die.

So that is really it. Oh and I have been invited to a winter solstice tree dressing which I am very excited about as I have photographed the oak tree on Mousehold heath for a number of years but never knew who dressed it and then I bumped into a woman at a conference and she invited me to join the group who do it (strangley this was still without her knowing that I had photographed it). The only trouble is she didnt tell me what time and I am wondering if I can be bothered to wait by a tree all day like someone has been stood up for a pagan ritual.

So there you have it, my guide to low carbon Christmas and I will be getting the train to Peterborough to see my family and probably finishing presents as I travel. So look out for someone sewing on the train, it may be me!

Magdalen Street Celebration

If you haven't heard of the Magdalen Street Celebration then WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?!!

But seriously the second street festival went amazingly well and I think these images convey the spirit more than I can in words.

What I will say is that the event is building a sense of community with more and more people being involved. This year Roys had their forecourt available for stalls so this spread the activities up the street. One of the cafes had a cooker outside and offered hot food alfresco.

A group of shops got together and had a fashion show of vintage and London influences. Entertainment wise there were new groups as well as the old favourites: Taiko Drummers and Golden Star Morris dancers.

The Anglia Square empty shops were offered again and played host to a wonderful selection of workshops including eco-crafts, puppet making from the Norwich Puppet Theatre and Story telling to name a few.

If you want to be involved next year then we are looking for volunteers. If you have any skill to offer then please do get in touch via the blog page or facebook page. Even if you are happy to go round with posters or are good at taking photographs then it all helps. The more the merrier! Our meetings are rather fun and take place in a Magdalen Street cafe everyone is encouraged to use their interests to contribute to the day whether it be an interest in history or knowing local people or organizations.

something to do and someone to do it with

Many years ago I trained as an Occupational Therapist. It was the perfect job for me because I absolutely loved doing stuff. My childhood was filled with evening activities and as a result I had 'Grade 5 piano' and 'was a Queens Guide' on my CV.

At a recent interview I discovered that these things are no longer held in such high esteem, however they made me what I am today so I am glad I did them. As my life progressed I grew bored of achieving and entered a new more spiritual phase in my life where it was more important to do things with people.

The creation of the Magdalen Street Celebration has been a most amazing experience of working alongside wonderful people to create 'something for everyone'. What is great about working on a project is that it is free leisure time. If you go to the gym or join a class you are paying to sit (I think this maybe frowned upon in a gym but my experience is limited) in a room of people you may not interact with. Being part of a project you get to make jokes round a table, drink tea and leave with the feeling you are making the world a better place in some small way.

Everyone takes part according to what they can do. The lovely James knows about music and has organized some great bands for the day. Karen is super organized and has made a spread sheet of all the workshops and stalls and fitted them into the empty shops in Anglia Square. Stefi is mainly bossy so we just did what she told us to do but it meant that in a bunch of lefty liberals at least someone was in charge. Andy was behind the scenes creating amazing graphics to give the celebration its yellow-black-hand print theme. I attended meetings and made jokes mainly.

Oh, and applied for funding, invited the mayor and made 100 metres of bunting (with a lot of help).

The 2nd Magdalen Street Celebration is tomorrow, Saturday 1st October, 10am-4pm, all along Magdalen Street, Norwich, NR. Click here for map and details of activities, stalls and music. line-up

Coming Round The Dark Mountain Part 2: the Shaman and the Village

“If Transition is the village, Dark Mountain is the shaman.”
(Patrick Andrews)

I’m having a conversation with Vinay Gupta, designer of the Hexayurt and SCIM and a consultant on State Failure solutions. It's just after our Where Do We Go Now session at the Uncivilisation Festival where Vinay had suggested that Dark Mountain was the literary wing of Transition and naturally speaks to people in the movement,"certainly those who are more restless". I was intrigued as to how he brought these two strands together and we’re having a jam with Patrick Andrews from River Simple and a young man who is listening on the edge from Transition Reading:

“Transition relies on consensus,” he points out. “Dark Mountain is something you can visit, Transition is something you live.”

Afterwards I talk with my fellow Transitioner about Living Without A Fridge and we laugh about the trials and tribulations of cooking seasonally and eating a lot of cabbage.

Image by Jim Clarkson

There are a lot of Transitioners at Uncivilisation from all over Britain, from Reading, Hereford, New Forest, Brixton and Wales. There’s all the intensity of a Transition debate here but without the concerns of the Village, worrying about whether “the community” is going to come to your event, or understand you, or fund you. No battle with the Council, no struggle to get Other People to do stuff. No psychology or sitting around in a circle talking about your feelings. Everyone understands you. Peak oil and climate change and financial collapse are a given and I’m experiencing a fluency amongst the Dark Mountaineers where I often feel tongue-tied in Transition, based as it is in academic discourse and science, in practical skills I don’t have. Everyone I meet at Uncivilisation is an individual with a collective story to tell: a poet from Scotland, a professional forager, the captain of a Greenpeace ship, a designer of hydrogen cars, a researcher into Luddite history. It’s the café I wanted to walk into ever since I first read about existentialism when I was 16.

Sitting around the fire, listening to these stories I realise that where Dark Mountain differs fundamentally from Transition is in its language. The Shaman knows all about creativity and the earth and the way one is a direct link to the other. He doesn’t do data or flip charts or use corporate terms like brand or income streams or talk about people being off-message. He is a right-brain intellectual, sees existentially in time and space and lives with death at his shoulder. None of his subjects are discussed inside the Village, which is maybe why later when I interview Dougald Hine, (co-creator of Dark Mountain) we talk about taboos and how Uncivilisation is a place where those taboos are deliberately lifted and everything is allowed. He calls that space “sacred”, which is a difficult word hedged as it is with religious beliefs and spiritual fantasy. I’m not sure what I would call it, except when you’re in it you know it. It’s like stepping out of the house and finding yourself in the forest and a man is stomping around in the dark wearing deer antlers. Suddenly all the petty stuff disappears.

I remembered then what Nick Osborne from Transition Glastonbury had said at this year’s conference about the need in groups for someone to break the tyranny of the status quo discussion and allow us all to go deeper, how we are all trapped in talking about the world in superficial and conventional ways, even though it is falling about our ears (as Mark mentioned in his post this week on Tea Parties). It seemed that what Transition needed then was the Shaman to come round the Dark Mountain and break all those polite society taboos, to bring the whiff of the ancient aboriginal earth into those airless meeting rooms, to transmit a sense of deep time, of our rough lineage, of wild trees, of the ease and intimacy of talking about Big Subjects, without being heartless, idealistic, or controlling the outcome.

And maybe conversely what Transition can bring to the poet outside in the storm is the warmth of ordinary life. The gifts from our low-carbon kitchens and gardens. The ability to laugh about our shared enterprise. The stability you get from working steadily towards a clearly delineated goal with an organised network and structure. Having lived on the edge for over a decade I know the value of engaging in Transition: of making those efforts to become part of a neighbourhood, to communicate explicitly with everyone you meet, of not being stuck inside your inner dramas and instead learning to think and act (and write) as a social being. To hold out for change and the possibility of people waking up in time. And perhaps most of all knowing you are connected to hundreds of initiatives struggling with the same difficulties. In a word, belonging.

The problem with the shaman thing is that no-one really wants to be in that lonely position. It sounds glamorous but the reality is hard. To fine-tune the psyche of the tribe (as Mircea Eliade once defined their function) means you live at the edge of the village and everyone is scared of you and you spend your life battling with the demons of the human heart, a kind of go-between between the void and the people sitting comfortably around the fire. To live in the Village is to be stuck in the minutiae of the village and its repetitious events and tasks. You are cut off from the big narrative, you have little opportunity to talk at a deep level or connect with the wind and the dark ocean. You live in a known world and you long for all the immensity and connection the unknown world can bring. What keeps you within its parameters is the thought of suffering and being alone. Of putting yourself on the line.


One of the key fringe conversations at Uncivilisation was between people in both these very distinctive movements as we recognised their common ground. We have all had our End of Suburbia moment and know that our caterpillar civilisation has to dissolve before the butterfly can emerge. And just as Transition can’t do activism and campaign work in the way one-issue groups can, yet is able provide a stable base and communications bridge, it can have a similarly friendly and creative relationship with the dreamers on Dark Mountain. We all live on the brink of a collapsing world constructed by magicians and city architects. Our major task is to see the illusion of this high-carbon life together and create a new narrative rooted in reality. We can’t do that without each other. We need to transform and belong everywhere - inside and outside. To get to a future beyond oil, beyond ecological and financial breakdown, we all have to be shamans.

And we all have live in the Village.

Cernunnos from the performance of Liminal by Douglas Strang; Illustration by Jim Clarkson of Jim Design for Amelia's Magzine; scyther; Wild Trees from Red Thread: My Journey Through the Rites of Uncivilisation 2011 20 by Cat Lupton; poets from Edinburgh and Dublin; plan for the future on marquee wall; trailer for film Forgotten Bird of Paradise by Dominic Brown; Paul Kingsnorth at the Farewell.

Now I have finished the pride preparations I can start doing stuff for the Magdalen street celebration. Some of you may know that this street festival was invented last year as a way of engaging local people in community and transition ideas. We decided that a party was the best way to get people involved in what was originally the NR3 transition group. The day was a resounding success and we are now planning the second one for 2nd October this year.

Like Norwich pride the event last year was run on a shoestring. Everybody pitched in though with their skills and enthusiasm. Anglia square had loads of crafts people on stalls. Under the flyover was the human dynamo which is a pedal powered pa system.Although the taiko drummers did not need a any amplification as their sounds echoed round the concrete walls.
Because it was so successful we have a rush on this year for bands wanting to play and people wanting to have stalls.

If you want to get involved we still need people to help both leading up to the festival and on the day. click on this link Magdalen street celebration to find out more.

I myself am going to sign off now as the people next door are smoking cannibis and its coming through the window and making me sleepy. I am going to wake up starving again, I know it......

Sometimes Known as Lughnasa

The alarm went off at 4.30 this morning and I stumbled out of bed.
“It’s cloudy over the sea”, said Charlotte as we looked east from the window to the horizon.
“Is it worth going?” I said.
“We could go up the lane to the oak instead.”

But we always go down to the sea to greet the sun at the beginning of August for the station of the year sometimes known as lughnasa.

So we found ourselves getting dressed and going to the shed for the bikes. The sun would rise at around 5.15 and it’s a good 20 minutes’ cycle ride to get to the sea.

My sturdy old town bike doesn’t go very fast even along straight roads, and this morning I was struggling through the empty streets against the breeze. Charlotte zoomed ahead.

Forgot the bike locks so we propped them against the railings and headed over the dunes. There was a tent on the beach but no sign of anyone apart from ourselves. I collapsed amongst the marram grass and almost immediately the sun appeared - straight out of the sea, red and glowing in a less dramatic, gentler sunrise than last year’s. The whole morning was warmer too. Before I knew it Charlotte had stripped naked (a rare event in Southwold) and raced into the water. Meanwhile I went to visit some nearby wild fennel.

We have some grand fennels in the garden, but for aromatic intensity they are no match for these wild ones. You know how when you rub peppermint and smell it you can feel it in your mouth even without eating it (if you haven’t done that before give it a try). Well, that’s what these fennels are like; just the lightest brush against them with your hand permeates your taste buds somehow. And it feels like it’s cleansing your whole mouth. I never realised I was so permeable before I encountered mint and fennel!

So if you ever come across me brushing lightly against these plants in the wild rest assured I am perfectly sane – come and join me!

Cycling back home we saw a flock of white doves on the common and stopped to collect some fallen wild cherry plums in the lane. The light in the garden was limpid and another sunflower had just emerged. I have a feeling that ALL of the sunflowers I planted this year are going to be the new form I wrote about the week before last. Not that I’m complaining...

Pics: wild fennel sunrise; sea sunrise; me, (new) sunflower, rose - all Aug 2011

Gatherings - The Treehouse Festival

Once upon a time, a group of university students who were fed up of just going to the pub or clubbing when they got together decided that they would meet up in a parent’s field and camp. They also thought that one of the hedgerow trees, a lovely mature oak, would make the perfect home for a treehouse. So they gathered waste wood from local neighbours and started to build a structure. There was a lovely cradle about 30 feet up in the tree, and they were determined to build the treehouse without the need to bang nails into the tree, so they supported it only directly on the branches, and where they needed more support, a post all the way from the ground below.

Needless to say, when their friends heard about this, they wanted to get involved. What a wicked project, right?! So over the course of several years, various groups of friends headed over to the field to help build this treehouse, but there was one week each summer when everyone would come at the same time to camp for a week and help build it. That’s the great thing about treehouses – everyone loves them! You can’t help being drawn to the community that builds it, a bit like the Korowai tribe of West Papua, where all the local tribes come and help in the building of a new treehouse.

We only ever used waste materials, even the double-glazed windows, which had been rejected from a local window company because… I don’t know, the wrong size or something? They looked fine to me.

As this summer building week got bigger and attracted more friends, it became The Treehouse Festival. The festival spurned such a fantastic sense of community among the participants that this started to become more important than the actual task of building it. It started to become an experiment in community living for a week each year. Everyone needed to eat, and rather than everyone making their own food on the campfire, it made sense to go in on the food together and cook big vats of stew or curry for everyone. So this we did. And the variety of activities grew too. Rather than just building: we’d play wide games (a bit like Lions, Hide and Seek or British Bulldog, all combined, in a large field); we’d have seminars and workshops; we’d play music round the campfire; we’d do archery. Altogether, it became a complete mini-festival!

After a few years, disaster struck. The local council decided that the treehouse required planning permission. So we filed an application (by far the largest cost the entire project faced). It was rejected. We appealed. It was again rejected. And we were ordered to have it removed. So, one bleak day, the friends dejectedly took the structure down.

But that wasn’t the end. Oh no, The Treehouse Festival lives on, despite the lack of actual treehouse. And we continue to build, but now it’s a roundhouse instead of a treehouse. We continue to party. We continue to camp and have fun. In fact, the party is getting bigger than ever. We have more and more varied seminars and workshops. We have more local bands at the final day party. We have a solar hot-water heater which we made using some of those double-glazed windows from the treehouse, a wooden frame and some hose-pipe (painted black), for hot showers on site. We’re thatching the roundhouse and cobbing its walls.
You might be able to tell that I’m very much looking forward to it!
If you want to know more about The Treehouse Festival or book one of the few remaining tickets to this year's event (18th to 24th July), go to www.treehousefestival.co.uk. Donations of useful materials, tools, equipment and expertise for workshops and seminars are also appreciated. Contact details are on the website. If you'd just like to come to the party at the end, details are here.
Images: The treehouse, before it was taken down; Freshly chopped firewood for the campfire; Table of (clean!!) crockery for the communal meals; Thatching the roundhouse.