The Chalice

FOURTEEN

Glastonbury Prop. Juanita Carey 14 November

… I had to write about this, Danny, put it all down, tell someone, even though I'm never going to send this one. I can't. Promised Jim. Couldn't even tell Diane what happened on the Tor or even that we were there last night. Although there's a lot she's told me in the house between one a.m. and dawn, most of it stuff I really didn't want to hear. It's seven-thirty a. m I haven't been to bed. You don't even want to imagine what I look like. Diane's taken a cup of chocolate (couldn't supply hot carob) to the spare room, with instructions not to emerge until lunchtime. And…oh, yes, the morning paper just came, Western Daily Press. With, at the bottom of page one, the item of news that explained everything Apparently, the Conservative Party last night chose the man it wants to replace our MP, Sir Laurence Bowkett, who has announced he won't be fighting another General Election due to his advancing arthritis.

The new prospective parliamentary candidate for Mendip South is one Archer Ffitch, son and heir of prominent Glastonbury landowner, the Viscount Pennard.

Get it? There's Archer smarming his way through a selection meeting while his wayward sister is camped on the outskirts of with a bunch of travelling vagrants living off the state and worshipping heathen gods. Well, imagine if the Press gets of this! So Lord P sends Rankin and son off to Don Moulder's field – Moulder having presumably tipped him off

– to remove the troublesome child by night, as discreetly as possible. OK, so one of the vagrants gets beaten up in the process. Big deal. Hardly going to report the assault to the police, are they? And even if they did, it's one of the accepted hazards of the travelling life, getting punched around by local vigilantes, etc.

Of course, I could report it myself, respectable High Street businessperson… 'Well, no, officer, I didn't personally witness the assault on the poor traveller by Lord Pennard's man, but I have it on the very highest authority… The Hon. Diane Ffitch, actually. You know, the one they call Lady Loony.' Added to which, I could hardly reveal how I found out about Diane without telling the whole story. And obviously, after what happened – I may have nightmares about it for years to come – I'm not what you might call terribly well-disposed towards these particular New Age gypsies, anyway.

Keep shtumm, then. Say nothing to nobody. Try and forget it. That's the answer. Always benefit from talking things over with you, Danny. Actually, that's the easiest problem to sort out. The big one is tucked up in the spare bedroom, dreaming of past lives.

When we got in I lit the woodstove. I didn't need one, especially at that time of night, but you can't talk meaningfully in front of an empty grate, and I really wanted to know why. What was the silly little cow DOING with people like that? I'm no wiser. What I got was Diane at her most infuriatingly fey. I heard about dreams and visions and portents (including a vinegar shaker in a fish and chip shop which magically resolved itself into a little Glastonbury Tor).

I heard (again) the story of the Third Nanny, who Diane believes to be the spirit of the High Priestess of Avalon, Dion Fortune, half a century dead. The truth is, I can't take this stuff anymore. Even rather read Colonel Pixhill's Diary – at least the old boy was a confirmed pessimist. I used to think that, at the very worst, New Age was fun. I got a buzz out of being the mysterious woman who sold books full of arcane secrets and therefore I must know most of them. I don't really know precisely when I stopped getting a buzz out of it, or precisely why, but I suspect that seeing what it had done to Diane was at least a factor. When your birth coincides with the death of your mother and your father blames you for that and you grow up in an all-male household of the worst kind, you become susceptible to the most absorbent kind of fantasy, and you start to live in your head most of the time. And when what's outside of your head happens to be Glastonbury, on the legendary isle of Avalon, and every time you look out of your bedroom window there s the magical Tor on the horizon.. what hope is there for you? Because she could always escape into her secret world, Diane let her family bounce her around, from relative to relative, boarding school to boarding school. Never known any other life, thought it was quite normal. Suddenly, at the age of twenty-seven she wakes up m Yorkshire in an arranged job, with an arranged marriage on the horizon, and she thinks, this is ridiculous, I'm a grown -up now, a person in my own right For the first time, a rebel. She finds a suitably outrageous way out, sends back her ring, joins the raggle-taggle gypsies. Been a long time coming; most of her contemporaries made their absurd gestures of independence at the age of about sixteen.

And because she really knows this is a fairly adolescent kind of stunt, Diane has to make it Significant by throwing the esoteric cloak over everything. Oh, it was meant… part of the great cosmic design… I was summoned back… I had magic signals from the Tor. It's my destiny! Well, bullshit, obviously, but if she goes around telling people about it at this end of town, they'll just all screech. Wow, too much man, far out, and set her up as Avalon's Seer of the Week. Meanwhile, indigenous locals will shake their heads and mutter about what an awful cross old Pennard has to bear, with that Lady Loony. And here's me in the middle again. Pennard already hates me for exposing an unstable child to an unlimited supply of occult literature (I hate me for that as well, but it could've been worse, she might have gone to Ceridwen). And now I've blackmailed the noble lord into letting the family madwoman loose in Glastonbury again, and he and Archer are going to be in a constant state of tension about what she might do to discredit the House of Pennard before the next Election. And when the Ffitches get tense – as amply demonstrated last night – they can do damage. The British aristocracy's full of genetic anomalies, and Archer – well, he's sort of Diane in negative, I suppose: hard and dark where she's nice and squashy and sort of pastel-coloured. But just as loopy, I reckon, in his way. Everything in Glastonbury inevitably becomes EXTREME. Who said that? Me, I suppose. New Age mystic turned born-again agnostic. I'd decided that healthy scepticism was the key to survival in this town, but if you 're a sceptic what's the point of being here anyway? Should I get out now, do you think, before something erupts? I don't know. Maybe I need a man again. Maybe I need a guru. Or God.

Talking of Whom, I'm told the Bishop of Bath and Wells has been making overtures to the New Age community. There's to be some sort of conference at which Liberal Christians are to 'interface' with well intentioned Green pagans to try and build a framework for possible Spiritual Bonding in the run up to the Third Millennium.

Only in Glastonbury.

Are we ALL going mad, or what?

And can anybody out there help us? Don't answer that. Can't anyway, if I'm not sending it. Goodnight. What's left of it.