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It’s been more than a week since I got back from Glastonbury, and I’m only just coming round to the bitter monotony that we call reality. My entire year builds up to, and winds down from that festival and that idea got me thinking; wouldn’t it be great if Glastonbury lasted longer than five days? I started to write down some ideas, and before long I’d written nine or ten pages. The next weekend I met with some ecologically concerned friends and my ideas went into overdrive. No matter what you may think of these ideas, I thought I’d be doing myself an injustice if I didn’t at least get them down on paper. It’s taken me a long time so the least you can do is read them all, treat this article more like a short book than a blog post, grab a coffee and settle in. I give you, Glastonbury City.

That Glastonbury Thing

Happening at the height of summer – usually within a few days of the solstice – there is something ritualistic and maybe even pagan about Glastonbury. The first time I went there in 2005, summer solstice happened on the first day of the festival and a parade of sun worshiping hippies marched past the Pyramid stage banging drums, carrying flags and recruiting bystanders to their pagan ritual up at the stone circle – it was a moment I won’t forget.

There’s something in those Somerset hills that comes home with you, a taste in the collective psyche of your fellow campers that warms your heart for the full five days. Altruism flourishes like spring blue bells, infecting everyone from the moment they set foot on Somerset’s sun warmed orchards. But however magical and wondrous that thing is, it dies slowly but surely over your summer until the dark nights of September set in and your aspirations shift away from the sun-toned Somerset hills and nose dive headlong into a beer puddle that shields you from the aggressive British winter. That’s the transition you feel so painfully each and every year you walk off Eavis’s farm; from spiritual to survival. From how I’d like it to be, to how it is.

Glastonbury is a rite of passage that convinces you until you feel it in your stomach that the world could and should be a nicer place. For five days, never ending commuters crusade onto Worthy Farm to be transformed, they cast aside their shackles of cynicism and see the world as it could be, and maybe they see the world as it should be. There are still hints here and there of the old world – there’s rubbish, but at Glasto it seems to be organised, it’s all recycled and people really play their part. There are still police officers walking around, reminding you that outside the city walls authority remains king, but inside the city walls, the police officers themselves can’t help but get caught up in the existentialist experience that surrounds them. Take these two for example, I spotted them talking to a chap smoking a spliff whilst asking if there was a pharmacy nearby. The spirit of Glastonbury rose above the authority of unworkable laws and it gave birth to two humans posing in non-human uniforms, and look how pleased they are! They’ve subtly hinted with their wacky spectacles that they too have been transformed into beings of a higher spiritual order. They’ve unified with their other, with me and you. I fear their crash back into their concrete reality will be felt harder than anyone else’s, but despite the vicious bump, I’m convinced they remain transformed. That’s why people flock to Glastonbury each year, to nurture their other self, their more charismatic, caring, fun loving, sun worshipping, friend cuddling self, only to neglect it again throughout the rest of the year. They want to be transformed.

With thousands of people carting in supplies, sometimes from hundreds of miles away, the gathering feels biblical in scale. It feels akin to the plight of the North Pacific salmon, who put such colossal efforts into their fresh water pool parties in Northern Canada, only to die en masse. I hope such a tragedy never ruins my beloved Glastonbury. There’s something earthy and human about Glasto, a sort of modern, godless pilgrimage to the better self. Its meaning, at least to those who take part, can hardly be over stated. In thousands of years time, a bearded post apocalyptic archaeologist will discover the site and rub his beard in wonder of what happened there. Why, he might ponder, are there hundreds of thousands of metal pegs in the ground? What significance do they have to the stone circle upon the hill? Why does the Pyramid face south? Why are there water pipes and huge troffs in the ground? Was this a site of mass sacrifice? To many, it is just a gig in a field, but history might offer it more significance.

With a capacity of 177,500, it temporarily becomes the third largest city in the South West, sitting just behind Bristol and Plymouth. Consider that for a moment; in little under a day, enough people show up to Worthy Farm to build a city bigger than Bournemouth. With some initial infrastructure already in place, the hippy masses build a city in which no one goes hungry and everyone has a roof over their head – in around 24 hours. That’s an inspiring thought – when focused we can construct magical cities in very short periods of time. It seems that for the construction of a 24 hour city we need only one thing – a shared idea that inspires and motivates. In Glastonbury’s case the end creation is so wonderful that the shared idea must be something even more inspiring than the festival itself. Anyone who’s really been to Glastonbury knows exactly what that idea is, it’s that Glastonbury…thing. It’s the guy who’ll chase you 100 meters to bring you a can of strongbow you unknowingly dropped. It’s the arm that appears with a lighter the moment you need it, punctuated with a loving nod. It’s the magical chance meetings with caring strangers whose lives inspire. It’s the tranquillity of the tipi fields overlooking the masses at the pyramid. For me, it’s the sunrise refracting through the morning mist that erupts into a celebration at the stone circle. The moments you share with the best of friends stick in your memory attached to vivid feelings, smells and emotions. A Glastonbury memory is rarely exclusively visual, so the moments stay with you forever.

Working for your weekend

People drag impossible quantities of food and supplies up hills and in the baking heat to fulfil their ambitions to feel that Glastonbury thing. They drag things for miles while the sun pounds down on their shy white skin teasing out their first sweat of the year; it’s tough work, but with the promise of that Glastonbury feeling they soldier through. They bring boats, lights, candles, sky lanterns, fire wood, poy, tipis, bikes, tuk-tuks, circus tricks, healing fields, pharmacies, shops,  food, drink, saunas, theatres, make-up and make believe, dragging it miles across the country to share it with their fellow festival goers. Hard labour goes into overload before Glastonbury starts and it’s not fueled by money or the promise of material gain, it’s fuelled entirely by that Glastonbury thing. Who’d ever have thought that people would work so hard at the promise of such a great time? Money motivates, but so do shared ideas. Glastonbury is proof of that.

All sunshine makes a desert, so the ancient Chinese proverb goes. It’s an idea I’ve considered over the years, and to some extent I’ve got real meaning from it when things go horribly wrong in life. If it (‘it’ really can be anything in this argument) was good all the time, then we wouldn’t know good and we’d experience only monotony, eliminating good as a real feeling. Maybe the reason Glastonbury happens only once a year and for only five days is for this precise reason? If life was like Glastonbury all the time then it’s allure would be lost?

I’ve  formed the opinion that this is nonsense. Life needn’t be exactly like Glastonbury all the time but wouldn’t it be nice to experience that Glastonbury thing in the parks and on the streets of our cities? Every morning, as you wait for the bus, someone might offer you a cup of tea from their flask – that would be nice wouldn’t it? If you were painting your house, people might appear from nowhere to help out, bringing drinks, life and a party atmosphere – that would be nice wouldn’t it? Sculptures would appear in our parks, pianos would materialise on our street corners and theatre would entertain us at our drinking establishments, all for that Glastonbury thing, and not those circular metal things that the bankers, wankers and bureaucrats currently hoard. It doesn’t take a radical mind to conclude that as things currently stand, you and I are being royally shafted by the powers that be.

We don’t need to replicate the toilets and the non stop consumption of cider, but couldn’t we somehow replicate that Glastonbury thing that comes home with you? That warm earthy feeling you get in your stomach as you drive onto Glastonbury’s car park? There’s a feeling you get at Glastonbury of kindred with your other festival goers. Surrounded by a swathe of humans all sharing your understanding of Time to Pretend, you come to an amazing realisation; that you’re not alone, that you are not just a lifeless cog in a machine, and that there are hundreds of thousands of people just like you. That feeling is the very thing that dies over the remaining weeks of summer. Why do we let it die each time the festival ends? How can we nurture it and share it with others upon our return to the normal lands? The people we share that feeling with for just five days a year are the people we should be living with full time.

The foundation of the idea. Money.

For the fairly large sum of £185 we get five days of music and a wonderland to explore. We share drinks, stories, songs and experiences, have a painfully good time then we go home.  It’s a great deal because as well as the wonderland to explore, the music is probably the best in the world. I’ve often felt that for many people, the music is of secondary importance to that Glastonbury thing – it’s that Glastonbury thing we’re all chasing. If we seem happy to pay £185 to build a magical but temporary city, would we be happy to pay £185 to build something more permanent?  That’s the question I’d like everyone who reads this to answer.

If everyone who went to Glastonbury this year each put £185 into a collective fund, we’d have £32,837,500. Could we build a city with that? We wouldn’t be able to pay Stevie Wonder, Muse and Snoop Dogg to headline, but we’d have enough money to build something pretty special. It’s enough money to buy most of Bulgaria if we wanted to, but it’s also enough money to buy a plot of land here in the UK – the spiritual home of Glastonbury. Is it possible that we could build a permanent Glastonbury? A spiritual theme park? A tall task, but whatever your thoughts lets start with what we know to be true. The team at Glastonbury Festival can build a substantial infrastructure, employ an army of 30,000, pay thousands of performers to entertain the crowds and still cut a profit at the end of the year using just that ticket fund. With a few priorities shifted here and there, what could a team of 177,000 build with thirty three million pounds? We can already build a Glastonbury Festival, so what are we capable of building if we approach it slightly differently? I’d cross jungles to hear other Glasto goers ideas on what we could build. What if we designed a festival that had an end product – a gift to the world, a place for people to come and visit and share in that Glastonbury thing all year round. These questions ignite my imagination into overdrive.

From Primaculture to Permaculture

How many people reading this blog took more than one packet of baby wipes to Glastonbury? At Glastonbury City (the name I’ve coined for a much longer Glastonbury festival) you’d take a flannel, and it would last the entire festival, no matter how long it lasted. How many people took boxes of museli snack bars, biscuits and bread? At Glastonbury City you’d take seeds and you’d learn to grow and harvest them and the lovely folk down at the tipi fields would show you how to make the most wonderous snack bars the world has ever seen. A huge proportion of what we cart up those hills to Glasto are products wrapped in the excesses and wastefulness of the culture we’re desperate to escape. I hate to say it, but Glastonbury Festival is to gatherings what Primark is to clothing; it’s epic in scale, but ultimately it’s throw away and wasteful. Glastonbury is Primaculture and it needs to be Permaculture.

What if, rather than the Primaculture structures of Tesco tents, we took the time to build something that would last longer and be more comfortable? Something that adds to the surroundings rather than takes away from them? It might require an additional amount of labour initially but with ambitions to last longer than 12 months, Glastonbury City would require some more substantial housing. To do this, there would have to be a huge increase in the use of Tipi’s but another solution might be a new type of structure called an Earthship. Earthships are a type of passive solar home made of natural and recycled materials, they generate their own power, they’re warm in winter and cool in summer, and they process water in a way that allows plenty of vegetables and plants to be planted nearby. Even more amazing is the way they are built, by collaborating with friends and using materials you can get for free or very cheaply all over the country.

Friends often opt to camp in large tents of five or six at Glastonbury, they spend a few hours erecting their large tent so that over the next few days they can play happy families and have fun in their temporary home. Even more common is a large group of friends building a miniature tent commune that consists of five or six tents with a happy sitting area in the middle. A similar thing could happen at Glastonbury City, with groups of five or six building an Earthship to live in over the next 12 months. The initial investment in putting up your accommodation would be greatly extended, but consider this additional building time in the context of a festival that lasts more than year, a festival with ambitions to create an eco city that stands the test of time. If one day of building and dragging supplies up hills is deemed a good deal for five days of Glastonbury Festival, a four week building stint for 12 months of that Glastonbury thing  might be just as good a deal, I for one would sign up tomorrow! If we were to represent the potential for greater enjoyment visually, it might look something like this:

Food, land and the economy

Now, we’d all be blind eyed fools if we thought that the 260 days of “Woo! Glasto!” could happen with just two weeks prudence and saving. If Glastonbury festival were to last longer than 12 months it would need a sustainable economy for festival goers to be a part of. It could be an economy with ambitions to make a modest profit with sustainable growth, allowing for more and more people to join the festival over the year, or it could be a completely sustainable economy that takes out exactly what it puts in. Whatever was decided, Glastonbury City would need a way to support itself, because 340 days of consumption dependent on imports would be an ecological, economic and hedonistic disaster on a biblical scale. Think the end of Rome littered with empty cider cups. It’s certainly a tall order to drum up an economy from scratch but lets humour the idea and start with the fundamentals. The highest thing on the agenda should be food production, would you agree? If so, the question that needs answering is this; could a collection of people as large as Glastonbury become self-sufficient in food production?

Current farming practises, at maximum capacity and using every trick in the book, can feed around 5 people per acre of land. That figure is based on curent western eating habits of high carbohydrates, plenty of meat, and industrial intensive farming. The downside, for us at least, is that you can’t really live on the land you’re growing food on because it contains just one crop. The colletion of earthships and tipis would get in the way of your oil guzzling tractor when you come to harvest it, we’d need a big central processing unit and everything would just get a bit messy and industrial. Living on a traditional farm Glastonbury Festival style is out of the question. There’s a reason Eavis kicks us off every year; we’d just get in his way.

There’s potentially another option. Permaculture (a settlement, gardening and food production philosophy that in recent years has really taken off) claims it can feed upwards of 10 people per acre. It requires no fertilizers, no pesticides, and after an initial outlay of labour, a permaculture system can require as little as 10 days maintenance a year. Permaculture, in a nutshell, is a system of farming that attempts to replicate nature rather than work against it. Think of it this way, if you leave a plot of land to nothing, stuff grows on it like crazy and within a year or two, you’ve got some extremely over grown land. How much effort was put into creating that growth? Precisely none, because nature took care of it for you. Permaculture is a way of bending the rules by creating mini eco-systems that compliment each other, it allows nature to do what it does best and it produces some fantastic results. The first thing I ever saw about permaculture principles was this, about a guy called Geoff Lawton who achieved the impossible on a plot of land in Lebanon. If they can do it in a desert 50m below sea level, we can do it here in the UK.

Theoretically, a Permaculture system on the 900 acre Glastonbury Festival site could support 9,000 people all year round, which is quite impressive but it’s a far cry from a festival supporting 170,000. If that idea were ever to come to fruition, an area 18 times the size of the current Glastonbury site and around half the size of Manchester would be needed – about 17,000 acres or so. You might think that finding a plot of land 26 square miles in size would be an impossible task, but you’d be surprised at what’s available.

The largest plot of land to ever go on sale in the United Kingdom has just come onto the market in rural Wales, all 23,515 acres of it. It includes a 4.75 mile long lake that’s over 140 feet deep, it has the UK’s first ever stone built damn and it’s home to a 5,000 acre forest, there’s also 90 species of birds living there, 31 cottages, and 14 leased farms. It’s certainly large enough to fit everyone in, but what about the cost? The price tag is £11 million for a 125 year lease, and I’m not really planning on being around in 125 years time so that sounds like quite a good deal! For arguments sake, lets say the Glastonbury collective bought the land using the £185 ticket fund, we would still have £21,837,500 left over to kit the place out. There would of course be a million t’s to cross and14 farmers to negotiate with but the possibility is there, right below our noses. Take a look at the potential location for Glastonbury City, the festival that aims to go the distance in time and scale. So where would you pitch your Tipi?

What you’re looking at is just part of the glorious estate that stretches over a billion square feet and houses a lake that’s visible from space. It’s incredible to think that it could be ours if we put our money together. That land could be the UK’s first ever ecocity, where pollution and overcrowding are a thing of the past. Everyone could get round on bikes or by boat along the lake, the daring amongst us could use kiteboards or windsurfs, and where trucks and vans were needed we could even process our own biofuel. For example, did you know that everyone in the country is now entitled to 2,500 litres of biofuel per year absolutely tax free? That’s the beginnings of a micro-economy right there, and micro-economies are currently all the rage in Germany. If we had the capacity to generate our own biofuel, and everyone had 2,500 litres to start with, the currency could be benchmarked against the biofuel we have created. It’s like a gold standard, only ours would be a biofuel standard.

Have you ever been taught what money is, how it works, or the history of it? They seemed to skip that class at school and as a result money has just been a constant thorughout our lives. We never question it, we don’t really understand it, we can’t imagine life without it, it’s just there, a universal constant. When you look at it a little closer you’ll confirm the niggling suspicions you’ve had all along; we are being made fools of by central banking. I don’t think you can overstate the level to which we are having the piss taken out of us. If you’ve not so much as pondered “what IS money?” then watch this film, it will take you forty minutes but it’s if there’s one thing you should watch from this blog post, it’s this video. The fundamentals present in it will, I hope, help to make a future economy that’s fair for everyone.

I don’t want to venture too deeply into the depths of creating a sustainable economy, I’m going to produce two follow up articles on this exact topic and I’m hoping I’ll get readers such as yourself to submit ideas and thoughts to the process. Just know that a sustainable economy can work but we will still need to trade with other economies, so whatever happens, Glasonbury City will have to produce something. Whether that’s cider, an eco-tourist trade, wax candles or biofuel is yet to be seen, but get your thinking caps on.

What are you doing now that’s so important?

When we crash land back to planet earth after our intergalactic trip to Glastonbury we’re left feeling like a demoralised fish who doesn’t have the energy to even flap about whilst it slowly dies in the baking sun. Our faces droop and our fingers flail at lifeless keyboards under the monotonous buzz of  halogen, our sun rises and sets at the flick of a switch and our primal desire to hunt and claim food is undermined by Pret A Manger and Tesco. Everything is so catered for that to merely exist, a privilege of such atom smashing consequence, requires no fight at all. Existence becomes a series of repetitive humdrum events sewn together by desperately short booze fuelled weekends. With no problems or challenges in our physical world we create problems our mental worlds. Anxiety, stress, paranoia, depression and work addiction are all symptoms of a society that has never had it easier, it’s a society starved of meaning. Our problem is our lack of problems, our problem is a desperate lack of meaning. The only challenge we collectively have is global warming and pollution, but they feel so abstract and unfathomable that we can’t possibly feel connected to them. We can’t feel as though we’re having an impact. That’s all we want isn’t it? To have an impact? Just throw the glass in the recycling each week and maybe you made a difference.

“My job is important… isn’t it?” you might wonder.

Well it isn’t. Face it, your job is not important.  It isn’t important unless you’re helping humans learn, or helping humans get better. Everything else is just sandwich filler designed to stop you leading an existence in which you question the existence of the state. Where jobs aren’t important people create myths, meaning and mantras to make them so, because it makes them feel important too. So desperate are people for identity and meaning in their lives that a demigod has risen from the flames of hell to bless the misguided amongst us with the nod of acceptance. Simon Cowell’s phrase of “you’ve got three yes’s” is our generation’s journey through the gates of heaven, only on the other side there’s nothing but a vacuous hole that sucks out your soul and sells it to a newspaper. Welcome to the rise of the idiots, people living on the fringes of popular culture holding their fingers up to a system they want no part in but with no idea for a system they’d like to take part in. Nowhere to go, nowhere to turn.

Isn’t that why we flock through Eavis’s gates each year? Because it’s a world we can feel connected to? A world we can fell a part of? If you’re looking for meaning in your life you’re not going to find it in the latest EP from a hip band who just arrived from California. It’s derivative of the vacuous culture as your own. You won’t find it on Brick Lane or on the editing room floor of a media conglomerate. Even the affluent amongst us, the people we most aspire to be, are absolutely consumed with emptiness and problems they themselves created. Amy Winehouse offers us nothing, Pete Doherty offers us next to nothing, Mark Ronson offers us nothing, and the vacant stare of Alexa Chung is nothing but an aesthetic high to temporarily plug the gaping whole in your soul. Our culture means nothing. But for five days a year, we mean everything. Our purpose emerges, and it seems to be aligned with being good to each other, being sustainable, using less mobile phones, being together and sharing new ideas stories and experiences. It’s about the construction of a better existence, or as Eavis himself calls it, “an alternative state”. If, as I believe, our generation is being strangled by the cynicism of our dying culture, isn’t it about time we started a new one? We don’t need liars, crooks, mercenaries and and thieves, we can do this ourselves.

The world is falling apart at the seams and we’re watching it happen, we’re swirling round the plughole clinging to paper thin ambitions of Bohemia. The party is over, the lights are coming on, and the venue is upside down. It’s time to etch the world we love so dearly into the hills of the Welsh countryside, permanently. There are plenty of things to think about, food production, economy, law, and everything in between, but it’s not impossible. Far from it. We’ve already put a man on the moon, we can make this happen.

I’ve made my point and now I guess this idea is in your hands. If my views have in anyway resonated with your own, if you’ve been waiting for something to shine though the sea of cynicism, maybe this is it. Sign up and then share this article into the upper echelons of the psyche sphere. I’m Phil Harper, and I’m on board.