The Chalice

ONE

Booksellers High Street

Glastonbury Prop. Juanita Carey 14 November Danny, love, Enclosed, as promised, one copy of Colonel Pixhill's Glastonbury Diary. More about that later. After this month's marathon moan.

Sorry. I'm getting hopelessly garrulous, running off at the mouth, running off at the Amstrad. Put it down to Time of Life. Put this straight in the bin, if you like, I'm just getting it all off my increasingly vertical chest. What's put me all on edge is that Diane's back. Diane

Ffitch. Funny how so many of my problems over the years have involved that kid. Hell, grown woman now – by the time I was her age, I'd been married, divorced, had three good years with you (and one bad), moved to Glastonbury, started a business… I know. A lot more than I've done since. There. Depressed myself now. It doesn't take much these days Colonel Pixhill was right: Glastonbury buggers you up. But then, you knew that, didn't you? I've been trying to think if you ever met Diane. I suspect not. She was in her teens by the time our paths finally crossed (although I'd heard the stories, of course) and you were long gone by then. Although you might remember the royal visit, was it 1972, late spring? Princess Margaret anyway – always kind of liked her, nearest thing to a rebel that family could produce As I remember you wouldn't go to watch. Uncool you said. But the next day the papers had this story about the small daughter of local nob Lord Pennard, who was to have presented the princess with a bouquet. Diane would have been about four then and already distinctly chubby. Waddles up to Margaret – I think it was at the town hall – with this sheaf of monster flowers which is more than half her size. Maggie stoops graciously to scoop up the blooms, the photographers and TV cameramen all lined up. Whereupon, Diane unceremoniously dumps the bouquet, hurls herself, in floods of tears, at the royal bosom and sobs – this was widely used in headlines next day – 'Are you my mummy?' Poignant stuff', you see, because her mother died when she was born. But obviously, a moment of ultimate embarrassment for the House of Pennard, the first public indication that the child was – how can I put this? – prone to imaginative excursions. Anyway, that was Diane's fifteen minutes of national fame. The later stuff- the disappearances, the police searches, they managed to keep out of the papers. Pity, some even better pictures there, like Diane curled up with her teddy bear under a seat in Chalice Well gardens at four in the morning. Years later she turns up at the shop looking for a holiday job. Why my shop? Because she wanted access to the sort of books her father wouldn't have in the house – although, obviously I didn't know that when I took her on. But she was a good kid, no side to her. She's twenty-seven now. Until very recently, Lord Pennard thought he'd finally unloaded her, having sent her to develop her writing skills by training as a journalist in Yorkshire. What does that bastard care about her writing skills? It was Yorkshire that counted, being way up in the top right hand corner of the country. An old family friend of the Ffitches owns a local newspaper chain up there, and of course, the eldest son, heir to the publishing empire, was not exactly discouraged from associating with the Hon. Diane. Yes, an old-fashioned, upper-crust arranged marriage: titled daughter-in-law for solid, Northern press baron and the penurious House of Pennard safely plugged into a source of unlimited wealth. But it's all off. Apparently. I don't know exactly why, and I'm afraid to ask. And Diane's back. When I say 'back', I don't mean here at the shop. Or at Bowermead Hall. Nothing as simple as a stand-up row with Daddy, and brother Archer smarming about in the background. Oh no. Diane being Diane, she's come down from the North in a convoy of New Age travellers. Well, I've nothing against them in principle. How could I, with my background? Except that when we were hippies we didn't make a political gesture out of clogging up the roads, or steal our food from shops, despoil the countryside, light fires made from people's fences or claim social security for undertaking the above. Hey, am I becoming a latent Conservative or what? Anyway, she rang. She's with these travellers – oh sorry, 'pagan pilgrims' – and do I know anywhere near their holy of holies (the Tor, of course) where they could all camp legally for a few days? Otherwise they could be arrested as an unlawful assembly under the terms of the Criminal Justice Act. Well I don't basically give a shit about the rest of them being nicked. But I'm thinking, Christ, Diane winds up behind bars, along comes Archer to discreetly (and smugly) bail her out with daddy's money… I couldn't bear that. So I thought of Don Moulder, who farms reasonably close to the Tor He's got this field he's been trying to flog as building land in some corrupt deal with Griff Daniel. Only, Mendip Council – now that Griff isn't on it, thank God – insists, quite rightly, that it's a green belt site and won't allow it. So now the aggrieved Moulder will rent out that field to anybody likely to piss the council off. I call him up. We haggle for a while and then agree on three hundred quid. Which Diane is quite happy to pay. She says they're 'really nice people' and it's been a breath of fresh air for her, travelling the country, sleeping in the back of the van, real freedom, no pressure, no cruel father, no smug brother. And at the end of the road… Glastonbury. The Holyest Erthe in All England, where, according to the late Dion Fortune, the saints continue to live their quaintly beautiful lives amid the meadows of Avalon and – Oh God – the poetry of the soul writes itself. The reason I mention DF is that, for a long time, Diane was convinced that the famed High Priestess was her previous incarnation -gets complicated, doesn't it?) God knows what the great lady would have written had she been around today. Bloody hell, this is the New Age Blackpool! Shops that even in your time here used to sell groceries and hardware are now full of plastic goddesses and aromatherapy starter-kits. Everybody who ever turned over a tarot card or flipped the I-Ching sooner or later gets beached on the Isle of Avalon. And the endless tourists. Not just Brits, but dozens of Americans, Japanese and Germans, all trooping around the Abbey ruins with their camcorders, in search of Enlightenment followed by a good dinner and a four-poster bed at The George and Pilgrims. OK, I should moan. The shop's never been more profitable. I've had to take on assistance at weekends (Jim Battle, nice man). But I'm not enjoying it any more, there's the rub. I'm feeling tense all the time (mention menopause and you're dead!!!). I see the latest freaks on the streets and I can see why the local people hated us twenty years ago, I too hate the New Age travellers blocking up Wellhouse Lane with their buses, marching up the Tor to tune into the Mystical Forces, camping up there and shitting on the grass and leaving it unburied.

And I can see why the natives still don't trust us, because they think we're trying to take over the town. And maybe we are, some of us. We say we're all for unity and the kindly pagans are getting into bed with the Christians and everything, but basically we have very different values and when some local issue arises it all erupts. Like the proposed new road linking central Somerset into the Euro motorway network. Most of the natives are in favour because it will relieve traffic congestion in the small towns and villages, but the incomers see it as an invasion of their rural haven, the destruction of miles of wonderful countryside. So whichever way it goes, half of us are going to be furious. It's not as if even the Alternative Community is united. We pretend to be, of course – old hippies, part of that great universal movement. But we're divided, factionalised: gay pagan groups, radical feminist pagans like The Cauldron. Everything in Glastonbury inevitably becomes EXTREME.

I lie awake, mulling over the old hippy thing – why CAN'T we all live in peace together on what's supposed to be the Holyest Erthe in all Britain? And then I go back and read Pixhill's Diaries, making myself doubly miserable because we 're the sole outlet for a book nobody want to buy on account of his Nostradamus-like warnings of impending doom, souls raging in torment, the rising of the Dark Chalice, etc., etc. Well, you just don't say things like that about Glastonbury. Because this is a HOLY town and must therefore be immune from evil. The people who settle here want to bathe in the sacredness like some sort of spiritual Radox – They want to be soothed. They don't want anything to dent the idyll.

Anyway, you should see a copy, as Carey and Frayne are the publishers. Let me know what you think. I'll go now. I think I can see Jim Battle, my best male friend these days, wobbling down High Street on what appears to be a new secondhand bike and looking, as usual, in need of a drink. Look after yourself, wish me luck with Diane and be glad your posh London outfit doesn't have to publish anything like the enclosed! Love,