Alan Lomax

Part of the pilgrimage to Penzance is pagan. Called by code in the DNA museum. A hard-wired response to midsummer that struggles to manifest in London. Ancestral gravity you know you will never break free from.

In Mock Mayor misrule, the storm of drum and streets stolen from order, I find part of myself. An atavistic fragment that kicks in sympathy when ale and ceremonial flames shove normality aside. When carnival calls this crowd, I need to be part of it.

It is fitting that Golowan, the ride towards Mazey Day, will start for me later tonight with Alan Lomax. This is a festival that revitalises and safeguards local traditions. Enacts his belief that folkways could lead people back to themselves. The past giving tools to the present, to carve direction, clear space for growth.

Lomax was a man who believed you reported best by placing your hand on your subject’s shoulder. Walk into the heart of things to record them. He did it with a microphone, I have always tried to do it with a pen. There has never been a moment when I come close to the shadow of his genius.

Station to Station

London is Sunday morning empty. Thinned of people, its places regain a sense of size. Paddington, owned by only a handful of bleary travellers groping for carriages, becomes a cathedral again. Isambard’s intent glimpsed. The station not as mere terminus, but as a temple to travel.

A sacred start is apposite. The journey to Penzance, the push to the end of the line, feels like a pilgrimage. Not just a leaving of London, a going beyond England. Any passage into the territory of a thousands saints cannot help but echo a kabbalistic climb. The Penwith hundred revealed as higher realms, holy ground. Crossing the Tamar a jump across the empty space of Da’at.

London to Penzance, station to station, is the best five-hour film never shot. The only possible rival to Chris Petit’s Radio On as the ultimate English trip movie. From the window you get the slow decay of exploded industries. Hills flooded with tumbling purple lupins. Warship glimpses. Red earth exposed as jubilant wounds in the green armour of valleys. You look ahead, see rails polished with sea spray.

Clear as gin sky. Murder sky. Miser grey sky. All extremes of English weather stitched together by thread of track.

I long ago learnt the only way to make sense of a city is by walking it. The journey through it the only way to trace the contour lines of history, to let its stories fold into you. Satori through movement. Maybe the only way to really grasp England is by train.

The Need for a Fluid Pilgrimage

The Three Bridge Kingdom is trivia in its original sense. Three canal arms meet as its island centre, the perfect haunt for the Queen of Ghosts, the Roman Hecate. Boats go east, boats go west. Their wakes crossing in a tense interference pattern. Each direction making its siren call for you to slip your mooring and follow.

This time of year, canalside nights swell with dreams of dark lantern craft heading east. The sly wheeze of engines carving the black mirror, carving the night towards Limehouse. Towards the Thames as if it were some spawning ground for narrowboats.

An urge to follow itches into waking. The need for a fluid pilgrimage. Our lady of the waters. Copper, orange and honey offered. Time to sweat locks.