Glastafari

As he stood there surveying the landscape, trying to work out where the hell he had left his van, Daryl the Dealer instinctively patted his pockets, tracing the outline of his pipe and clipper, evicting a hefty chunk of left-over bap from his jacket and stuffing it in his mouth, but realising quite soon that his personal stash - a Ferrero Roche sized lump of supreme quality kiff from the mountains of Riff, had gone.

Frantically, he began to search the scorched earth, telling himself that it shouldn’t be that difficult to spot a large silvery lump. Up and down the Tor he went, getting more and more desperate for a spliff.

And as if by magic, he spotted it, a silver nugget poking out from behind a tuft of incinerated grass, a few feet from the top of the hill, within tooth spitting distance from the bloody smears he’d left hanging in mid-air. Things were definitely looking up.

But no sooner had he straightened up and brushed the ash from his tin foil stash, he lost his footing and began tumbling down the hill, his beloved pipe, clipper and stash flying out of his hand, the crispy incinerated earth suddenly opening up beneath him, sending him down towards the very bowels of the earth. Down and down and over and over he went, into the blackness, into the heart of the labyrinth.

* * * * *

Back at the Tipi Field, Ariadne also found herself totally in the dark about what was going down. She thought that she knew all there was to know about the End of Time. She’d certainly read enough books on it. She didn’t yet know exactly why, but Glastonbury Festival had the End of Time written all over it. This was undoubtedly The Big One.

She’d been told that every soul that there has ever been would return to Earth at this time. Just what they were going to do when they got here, she couldn’t say, but she’d been told that for Earth mother types like her the End of Time would be an extremely busy time, re-birthing tens if not hundreds of thousands of ancestors. There being a dire shortage of Earth mother types to handle the rush, people like Ariadne would have no time to themselves at the End of Time. She’d be knocking out legions of Great, Great grandfathers and Auntie Nelly’s and Cousin Gavin’s 24/7, her knees permanently bent, her voice box terminally crumpled. A vast round-the-clock team needed to support her under arms, and mop her brow, as she desperately tried to knock out another 900 Ukrainians before lunch.

Turning her back on the widespread pandemonium, she’d retired to her palatial tipi to await the rush, laying out her spiritual ‘Welcome’ mat, and chanting that old portal door chime, ‘Earth my mother, Water my soul’ a few hundred times.

To be honest, she was a little pissed off that the spirit world hadn’t bothered to warn her about this. Not about the possibility of cataclysm. That had always been on the cards. Nostradamus, the end of the Mayan Calendar, the Hopi Peace Prophesy, The Book of Revelation. History had set up so many stalls in the market place of doom. No, the exact date and rough time would have been nice, like what that old nun Mother Mira had believed she’d been given. She’d been told that a mile-high tidal wave, similar to the one that trashed Crete, was going to hit Europe, for no apparent reason other than to bring all the negativity in the world to the surface, and to give our un-enlightened souls a quick wash and brush up before the space ships arrived. Mother Mira had apparently been given the exact date and time. She’d spent months globetrotting and door-stepping presidents, pestering rock stars and embarrassing the pope to urge immediate action. Never mind that nothing had actually happened. Apart from a lot of frantic New Agers hauling crates of baked beans up to the top of Scottish hillsides. Stuff, even cosmic stuff, got postponed sometimes. But at least she’d been kept in some kind of a loop. Now that things had most obviously come on top for Glastonbury, Ariadne would have appreciated a bit more of a heads up.

As ever, Star and Nick were by her side, actually very grateful to have something to focus on. Some might call them misguided fools, but as John Lennon once sang, “Whatever gets you through the night…” And if that meant having Ariadne scream blue murder in your ear for hours, then so be it.

* * * * *

If Daryl the Dealer had spent his evenings watching the History Channel instead of hanging about under moody viaducts, he might have been aware of the craze in the early 20th Century for excavating Britain’s sacred sites in the hope of finding all manner of ancient bling. He may have been aware of the presence of several long abandoned mine shafts that the Duke of Somerset had sunk into the side of Glastonbury Tor in 1926, as part of a misguided and extremely costly expedition to retrieve the several tons of priceless artifacts that local legend had assured him lay at its centre; in particular a life sized golden statue of King Sid. If Daryl the Dealer had watched a little more History Channel instead of car headlights in lonely lay-bys, he might have understood a little more about what he had gotten himself into, for it had been down one of Somerset’s long forgotten mine shafts that he’d tumbled, grazing his arms and legs, getting jabbed in the ribs and poked in the gut by some pretty vicious lumps of jutting masonry, ending up in a dark, dark place indeed.

He had hung out in some pretty dire places in his time. The squat party scene had come up with some truly nasty venues - bombed out, rat infested, piss stinking, soul destroying dives that made you want to top yourself, or at least flirt with the potential for topping yourself by buying highly suspect pills and potions from the likes of Daryl. Daryl had done alright working the dank labyrinthine darkness of post-industrial landscapes, selling poison to troubled teenagers. But however messed up his working environment had been in the past, he’d never seen anything like this before.

How had it come to this? Trapped inside a tourist attraction. Drug runs had often thrown up all manner of logistical problems, but this latest one to Pilton had really taken the disco biscuit. He’d lost just about everything but the shirt on his spotty back, and the most annoying thing was that he didn’t have the faintest idea why. There didn’t appear to be any way back, and even if there was, ‘back’ looked like a giant slice of burnt toast.

But at least he was alive, with no new breakages, and out of any immediate danger. Musty as it was, there was a certain womb-like quality to the inside of Glastonbury Tor. He was exhausted, but figured that if he could just find the strength to carry on, he might just find a route out of this pit of despair.

* * * * *

Earnest had also found himself trapped inside a pit of despair - the festival’s makeshift police station.

Whatever he’d whispered back at the alternative site seemed to have done the trick, the path of total destruction having inexplicably ground to a halt just a few feet in front of him. It was as if the hand of God itself had reached out to whichever diabolical architect of despair was perpetrating this mayhem and gone, “Go on then, pull my finger.”

He’d stood there for what seemed like hours, petrified, and nasty smelling. Let’s just say that something had happened to him to give a whole new meaning to the term ‘flowing robes’. Only when he had been absolutely sure that the danger had passed had he opened his eyes. There, amidst the bombed out ruins of the alternative site, was a barbequed hand, quite possibly the very same hand that had been passing round the hash fudge just a few hours before.

Not surprisingly he’d had this tremendous urge to get as far away from there as possible, to seek safety in numbers. Onwards and onwards he’d trundled his crucifix through vast choking clouds of smoke, passing the cauterized remains of the huge cross that he’d seen earlier. Now looking like someone had seriously overdone it with the lighter fuel at the Klan’s annual picnic.

Eventually he had arrived outside Gate Two, a complete mess of tangled crash bars and crushed port-a-cabins, the ground covered in torn ticket stubs and unfurled toilet rolls. Within just a few feet of the gate he’d collapsed and passed out. Just how long he’d remained there he couldn’t say, but he’d woken up to the sound of raised voices inside the site. Quickly he’d scrambled to his feet, hammering on the metal as loudly as he could. He’d hammered again. Then something mighty fierce had slammed into the gate, making him jump, his gut instinct telling him to get out of the way as fast as he could. A split second later - BAM! A police Land Rover had come crashing through like some cruise missile leaving its silo.

Whoever it was that was driving, they had been so desperate to escape the festival that they had been prepared to punch their fragile egg-shell skull through a vast wall of reinforced steel; in no way a ringing endorsement for what was going on inside.

He hadn’t a clue why he was being held by the cops. He’d told them all he knew at the front desk.

“I suppose, If yer going to drag someone in to help with your enquiries,” the custody sergeant had quipped. “Then who better than the Son of God?”

And Earnest had to agree that if the cops were to lean on the real Jesus a little then they probably would find out why Glastonbury Festival had gone so horribly wrong. He was bound to have had some answers; cast a little divine light on the whole matter. Only, Earnest was most certainly NOT the Son of God. He was born in Guildford. His dad had sold guttering. He’d once played a palm tree in the school nativity, failed in RE and made crap things out of balsa wood. What could he say? They had the wrong guy.

Or did they? As far as Chief Inspector Ash was concerned, Earnest fitted the bill perfectly. Everyone now suspected that something dodgy was going on. No-one, especially Ash, knew what that could be, but it had proven devastating and deadly and it was possibly man-made. But as with practically every suspected incidence of terrorism that there has ever been, it sure helped for the police to be seen to have some kind of lead, to have something to announce, if only to buy time. Ash needed a patsy, and he’d obviously landed himself some kind of Christian fundamentalist, a weirdy-beardy hippy radical. But most important of all, he’d landed himself a “man taken in for questioning”.

So Earnest had landed up inside a cell, stuffed with very smelly bunch of assorted miscreants. As well as his piss stinky self, he’d been amazed to run into the equally nasty smelling and still very much concussed Croppie Pete, who’d been dumped on from a bloody great height by an incoming 747, and mistakenly arrested while trying to escape from his alien walk-in sister, Fliss. Pete didn’t seem to have a clue where he was, or even who he was, and he hadn’t spoken a word for hours. Earnest couldn’t imagine what he could have done to get busted in the middle of a deadly meteorite shower, but he was glad that he’d survived.

There was DJ Nimbles, last seen hurling vinyl in a Dance Tent coated in crap, now fitting in quite nicely with the overall theme of wall to wall filth and degradation, holding up his particular corner of the nasty fug with the sharp chemical tang of port-a-loo.

There was the highly sweaty Blim, a Mancunian with more swagger than a helter-skelter, whose main claim to fame appeared to be cutting a rug on stage with the infamous Sad Fridays, enfant terror-balls of Manchester’s legendary Hyena Club. There was something extremely edgy and menacing about Blim, an intense demeanour that gave you this constant feeling of unease, not dissimilar from how you’d feel if you kept knocking over Noel Gallagher’s pint. Blim was real. Really real. Which made his story about how he’d been arrested in the Green Future’s Field by two drug squad officers dressed as aliens, all the more extraordinary.

Life in the cell, for some now many hours long, had been chock-a-block, shoulder to shoulder, pumped-up, bloody, muddy and highly uncomfortable. Perhaps the greatest discomfort of all, not knowing what the hell was going on in the outside world. So it was a tremendous relief when the door finally opened, and the one time children’s TV presenter and self-confessed Messiah, Dan Sykes, was pushed in on a gust of relatively fresh air.

He’d managed to cover twenty yards or so before driving the stolen police Landrover into a huge ditch. It being the Chief Inspector’s precious Landy, they’d really thrown the book at him, arresting him for criminal damage, taking and driving away, reckless abandonment, actual bodily harm, assault, affray and breach of the peace.

“Alien scum!” He shouted, as the door slammed behind him. Pushing his police file in the general direction of Section 12 of the Mental Health Act. “It’s not over, you know. We won’t just walk into the night.”

Earnest never forgot a face, even if it was covered in blood and looked completely manic. A few years ago, he and a very similar looking guy had appeared alongside their mums on ‘TANIA’, a daytime agony-type chat show, under the banner ‘HELP! MY SON’S CHRIST COMPLEX IS RUINING EASTER’. It WAS him. They’d shared tea together in the canteen at Pebble Mill. Screaming Lord Such of the Monster Raving Loony Party (RIP) had been at the next table.

“Dan Sykes? Is that you?” The one Son of God said to the other. “It’s me, Earnest. Do you remember me?”

Sykes froze, struggling to adjust his eyes to the gloom. Someone had clearly recognised him. Slowly he turned round, wary that some kind of Illuminati confidence trick was being played out to befriend information out of him. They were obviously trying to get at the Light Workers.

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” he said, trying to make sense of the murky space.

“It’s me, Earnest, a fellow Jesus. Remember?” Earnest tried again, rising from his bench, sending a warm waft of stale piss across the cell.

“I don’t know you,” Sykes said, a little more forcibly, denying Earnest for the second time, and beginning to wonder just how bad the stench could get.

“We were on TV together,” Earnest pressed on, starting to doubt himself. “You think you’re the Son of God.”

“You heard him mate. He don’t know yer,” Blim intervened, annoyed that this absurd mistaken identity was getting in the way of a rare and substantial update on the outside world.

“I have never met you before in my life,” Sykes snapped, denying Earnest for the third time.

“Here mate, you can sit here,” Blim said, shuffling up, positioning Syke’s relatively stench free body between himself and the reeking Croppie Pete. “Tell us all about it.”

* * * * *

Chief Inspector Ash was also on a mission to find out all about it, for the time had come to leave the site and have a good look around outside, to head up a small search party and seek out anything remotely resembling civilisation. By mid afternoon, they were already quite a distance from the festival gates, stumbling through the gloom like some kind of doomed expedition, sluggishly going where no-one in their right mind had gone before, in search of life.

All around it was like a scene from an Ingmar Bergman movie, all charred and gnarled and dingy, with clouds of thick acrid smoke clinging to the edge of vast craters, all under a bruised sky, It may as well have been the surface of some distant lifeless planet, a harsh and forbidding landscape; the sort of place where entire mining operations get overrun by wave after wave of hideous and completely unreasonable, acid-drooling monsters.

There had to be a bloody good reason why the outside world had failed to put in an appearance, and the endless speculation as to why that was had been driving him crazy, undermining every fibre of his being.

He was a cop, a senior officer. Unless he could find someone more senior to play catch with, the buck stopped with him. Hundreds of thousands of people were now relying on his leadership, his expertise, his nerve. And he in turn was now relying entirely on his good luck and intuition to venture forth and find some God-damn answers. As he looked back at the festival site, before their small expedition disappeared below the horizon, he found himself wishing desperately, “Please don’t tell me that this is all that’s left.”

He’d wanted to keep the mission as low key as possible, just him and a carefully selected handful of police officers and security guards. But the land owner, Mathew Beavis, had gone behind his back and called in the assistance of Greenpeace, because he trusted them and because they had all the right gizmos apparently, including a Geiger counter, solar powered wot-nots, climbing rope, protective clobber, and first-hand experience of disaster zones. Ash didn’t like it one little bit, and the whole mission was beginning to feel like one of those post Cold War joint Rusky/Yank efforts - two former adversaries working together ‘in the spirit of peace and good will’, but still with plenty of deep-seated suspicion.

Dr Suzie Meyer was now convinced that there had been a major man-made disaster, followed by a major cover-up. Beyond that, she couldn’t say. But she had jumped at the opportunity to tag along.

Security guards, Spike and Wesley had also gone along. Spike still wearing a huge plaster across the bridge of his nose By rights both men should have been at each other’s throats, especially seeing as Wesley had lost his bottle back at Gate Two and left Spike to repel a stampeding herd of no-claims bonuses on his own. The bond of trust between the two men had been broken. In Spike’s eyes Wesley was a coward. He’d done the security guard equivalent of cowering in the trenches, whilst his comrades were being mowed down on the battlefield. In Spike’s Great Grandfather’s day, Wesley would’ve been given the white feather treatment, frog-marched off to the corner of some forlorn foreign field and shot.

As far as Spike was concerned, a security guard’s contract had only the one stipulation - ‘DEATH BEFORE DISHONOUR’. But he was a professional, and even though their personal relationship had broken down, he was duty bound to follow his boss’s orders without question. Wesley had been chosen, and Spike would just have to put up and shut up, and look forward to the day when he could give the loser a sound smack in the mouth.

They’d all been heading due west from the site for a few hours and the Chief was looking dog-tired, barely able to put one foot in front of the other. During one of their increasingly frequent breaks, Inspector Bumstead found him sitting alone some little distance off with his head in his hands, resigned to endure many more hours of punishing terrain. Seizing his moment, Bumstead sidled up to him and crouched down.

“Sir, can I talk to you man to man, so to speak?” He said, sheepishly looking about. “You know, off the record.”

Ash continued looking at the scorched earth between his knees.

“I was wondering whether you were aware that amphetamines have been, and are still, used by armies around the world,” Bumstead continued. “British troops used about seventy two million amphetamine tablets during the Second World War, and American bomber pilots used to call them “go pills”.”

Ash merely took a swig of his water, and carried on staring at the ground. For Bumstead, it was now or never - now or never get promoted, now or probably get severely reprimanded and even busted. But he’d been buzzing his tits off for several hours already, and he was feeling reckless. The least he could do was to let the boss in on a little trade secret.

“Yes Bumstead, what is it?” Ash said, looking up, his eyes struggling to focus on Bumstead’s face. He felt lost, a million miles away, unable to grasp even the most inappropriate question from a fellow officer.

“Sir, do you fancy some speed?”

“What did you say?” Ash said, desperately trying to hear above the thousand voices in his head.

Bumstead tried again, Ash’s fuzziness playing havoc with the lining of his stomach.

“Sir, do you fancy some speed?”

“Speed,” Ash smiled darkly, still very much lost inside his own private hell. “Ah yes, more speed, less haste.”

“Exactly,” Bumstead agreed, sensing some kind of consensus. “Half the students in the country are on it. How do you think they pass all those bloody exams?”

Ash seemed to suddenly remember where he was and who he was.

“What do you want, Bumstead?” He snapped, as if seeing the Inspector for the first time.

“Would you like some speed, sir?” Bumstead repeated, straightening up, beginning to suspect that his career was heading towards the ‘never’.

“Bumstead, are you trying to offer me drugs?” Ash gasped, perhaps rather too loudly.

“Sir, we are in a war zone here,” said Bumstead. “We haven’t slept for nearly two days, and we need all the help that we can get.”

Ash took a closer look at Bumstead’s face, which instinctively stopped chewing its lower lip. He then looked over at his men. Like him, PC McNally looked completely shagged out, dozing off and propped against a huge boulder. While PC’s Wilson and Stevens seemed to be the life and soul of the party, chatting away, rocking back and forth on their haunches, chewing their lips and gurning like crazy.

“Are the men also on drugs?” asked Ash.

“What do you mean, ‘also’?” Bumstead said defensively, desperately back peddling. “No one is on drugs. It’s just that I found this little sachet earlier on, about five grams. I haven’t had the opportunity to hand it in. And now, with the way things are heading, and us being stuck out in the arse end of no-where for God knows how long, I was wondering whether…”

Bumstead suddenly broke off, letting his eyes dive into an imaginary swimming pool, a very deep end indeed, praying that the Chief could work out the rest. He had already said way too much. And after the longest silence, with his career teetering on the edge of a deep precipice, the Chief motioned him closer.

“Show me,” he asked, looking about for potential witnesses.

Bumstead opened the palm of his hand revealing a sachet of fine greyish white powder, for Ash, the edge of a very slippery slope. Whilst having been offered them on many occasions by mildly bent colleagues at Christmas and birthday parties, he’d never taken drugs in his life.

“This won us the Battle of Britain,” Bumstead said, throwing down his last hand. “The US Air Force still uses it.”

For some reason Ash suddenly remembered something this student had once said to him at a pro-cannabis rally. Apparently Queen Victoria had smoked pot to ease her period pains.

“You say that it was used by the RAF?” Ash asked. “The few? Biggles was on drugs?”

“Developed FOR the RAF. Where do you think ecstasy came from?” Bumstead said semi-smiling, suddenly sensing some kind of breakthrough.

“Sir, these are our tools. Of course they have been misappropriated and abused by the general public, particularly our youth. But these substances began life in the military – tried and tested and approved. And in times of need, we must bring them back home. There is no shame here. Just see it as a form of standard issue, regulation head wear.”

Ash took another look at his men. PC McNally was now dribbling from the corner of his mouth, whilst PC’s Wilson and Stevens were laughing and throwing sodden teabags at one another.

“Okay, what do I do?”

“Just wet your finger and stick it in this bag.”

“Listen Bumstead, what’s done in the field, stays in the field, do you understand?” Ash said as he gave his finger a generous soak, dunked it into the sugar bowl and stuffed it into his gob.

“Absolutely Sir,” Bumstead smiled. “Now take a swig of water. Three more dabs and in about 15 minutes you’ll feel like a new man.”

It was at this point, having washed away the bitter after-taste of a generous dab of a highly illegal controlled substance that the Chief Inspector noticed that he was being filmed by…

“Oh, for pity’s sake!”

Glastonbury Lives’ hostess, Sasha Lush, and her cameraman Roy had finally caught up with the expedition. It had been a real mission trying to keep tabs on this particular plot development, but she’d stumbled on regardless, making up the distance, mindful that there had to be a viewing public out there somewhere just waiting to cream their pants over their explosive content.

Summoning what little strength he had left, looking for all the world as if he had just been discovered smoking crack behind the bike sheds, the Chief sprang to his feet and took flight, leaving Inspector Bumstead to marvel at his quick metabolism, leading Sasha Lush’s cameraman to believe, as he followed the entire extraordinary scene, and captured the sudden sickening thud and crack of the Chief Inspector’s nose as it seemed to explode in mid-air, that someone was shooting at them.

* * * * *