15 the July 2024

We've had this lad staying. His identity is built upon his on and off life of a new age traveler. I left the scene shortly before he joined and I ve had brief returns over the years. I left just as the green new age thing was coming to a end and the puritans ethnic was breaking open to rave culture and the growth of a nihilistic outlook where tranps and beggars came together with the shift from cannabis, lsd, mushrooms that provided a DIY shamanism. These new travellers, aligned with road protesters and the drugs took on firstly an alcoholism of cheap cider and the now iconic special brew giving its name to a wild sub genre of the movement; the brew crew. Given that the government were implementing their Criminal Justice Bill arguably the new Agee travellers needed some protection or at least a harder edge. The moralistic originals were starting to slip off to Ireland, Portugal and Spain for an easier life. By now most had children and few parents wanted to see their kids grow up like that.

The lad who stayed for a few days has only a rudimentary understanding of his cultural history and has been a heroin addict for the 23 odd years I've known him for. He aspires to a. paganism and so I showed him one of a group of lives I had made for friends during winter solstice. All the wood came from Pilton and the blades were holly, the handles in oak with three black walnut rivets. I explained their sacred mature, their imbued power. He knew golly was white but when I tried to explain where the word Druid came from he looked blank and ignorant. I explained that Dru means oak and Id is Latin for knowledge I further explained that Druid means the knowledge of the oak. Holly is the holy word and that these knives had been made on sacred ground using sacred material. What disgusted me was that surely Druid must be in the first term of hippy school but he didn't even know that. Further he had no yearning to learn.

He's lost. Far more than I am.

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