The email came through on Thursday morning marked Urgent. It was from Greenpeace. They needed someone to be at a music festival this weekend in Shropshire and were willing to pay for the ticket and all expenses, in return for manning the stall with two others. It sounded like a job for me.
And so it transpired that on Saturday morning I donned the Greenpeace vest in a field owned by Farmer Phil (whose festival it was) and began to work. The point was to sign up as many people as possible as "Arctic Defenders", essentially a petition to protect the Arctic from oil drilling and industrial fishing. This year's Arctic sea-ice minimum, which tends to be smaller each year due to climate change, is expected to be on September 15th. On the same date in London there will be revealed the world's largest polar bear puppet, the size of a double-decker bus, controlled from within by a team of puppeteers, and wrapped in ribbons bearing the names of the millions of Arctic Defenders. If you're in town feel free to join the parade!
We too had our own polar bear outfit and so for the second time this year I found myself taking on the appearance if not the essence of a wild white furry and probably doomed carnivore. I received more hugs from men, women and children in those two days than previously in my entire life. If you're feeling hug-starved now you know what to do. I even found myself on the main stage between acts, waving my giant white paws as my fellow Greenpeace volunteer had the harder job of announcing what we were doing there.
It's been a good week for live music. Last Wednesday was the monthly folk music night at a pub in Ceinws to which some of my new Machynlleth friends were going so I tagged along too. In a back room were about ten musicians with a variety of instruments - violin, saxophone, Irish pipe, accordion, Irish drum and a few acoustic guitars. The sound they drew forth from these, usually accompanied by a lone male vocal, was enrapturing. They each played as if they'd been doing nothing else their whole lives. There was no chat in the room, the focus was wholly on the music. People who weren't playing just sat with a wistful expression. At one point in the evening a guitarist put his instrument down and sang a haunting melody in Gaelic, completely unaccompanied. No one wanted to leave, we were all still there at midnight.
On my land I have the music of the birdlife to accompany my labours. Sadly most of the more tuneful birds who tweeted their way through May, June and July have now moved elsewhere but I still have the raucous cawing of the crows, the hoots and squawks of pheasants, the shriek of a circling buzzard, the occasional honking of geese. OK it's more John Cage than Mozart but it's something.
More practically, the tree stumps are nearly all out after a two hour blitz by Greg and his digger, quite a wonder to behold these massive gnarly artifacts being torn out of the ground as if they were mere weeds. The final few will meet their end on Thursday. I've already made a start on the first couple of raised beds, marking their dimensions with string (10m by 1.2m) and digging them over extracting any remaining root systems of soft rush or other similarly nefarious weeds. I have room for 23 raised beds so I've got a fair bit of spadework ahead! Hi ho, hi ho...
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