Hold onto hope

“I’ve made a list of what I want to do”. “I’m not going if there isn’t mayonnaise”. Well that was the kids sorted for the Greenbelt Festival… and my hope was for some sleep! Lidl had provided me with a free birthday doughnut the night before (not really my birthday, but a good life hack is to provide a different date of birth to different shops so you spread the free treats through the year!), so all was looking rosy once we’d got a new battery for the van.

As with previous visits to Greenbelt, we’d planned to camp with a group of friends and as we were the first of our party to arrive we staked our claim on a suitable spot. We were shortly joined by another tent’s worth… then another… then another (who pitched a rather large porch that was larger than their tent)… leaving just one space. The wildlife was doing its thing around us; grasshoppers and crickets humming in the long grass and a kite circling overhead sizing up which child it would eat next. And then our party was complete. Due to the excessive porch of one of our group (which incidentally didn’t have planning permission), the final pitching had to be at a jaunty angle, but no-one minded.

This year we’d borrowed a coolbox that was better than ours, so our dinner was still frozen when we came to cook tea, but it was very tasty and gave us longer to enjoy our wine. After some swift washing up, the festival ground opened and in we all trooped, to meet up with some family friends. Our kids were enamoured with some butterfly wings that the eldest daughter of the other family had… and after a little negotiation our kids were happily fluttering around the site. As the coolbox was doing so well, we purchased bacon for breakfast the next morning, set the kids to sleep and briefly consumed wine and chocolate under a crystal clear sky peppered with stars.

After a chilly night (which required a woolly hat), we emerged at 7am, surprised that our youngest was still asleep (they’re normally the first up at home!). By the time we’d had coffee, eaten breakfast, made packed lunches and done the washing up, somehow it was 9am and we had no idea what we were doing at the festival. OK, maybe I’ll speak for myself!

It seemed prudent to attend the family welcome session, then I was happy to remain with the kids whilst Kiri headed off to… something or other! After letting off some steam, I joined the kids for a magic and ventriloquism show. Now I don’t know whether it’s just a comment on my maturity, but I seem to have profound experiences when observing kids’ shows at Greenbelt. As I looked around the tent, I was struck by how engaged all age groups were in this traditional, good, clean fun. There’s something about quality art that speaks louder volumes than politics… even if the target audience is children!

Near the end of the show, I spotted Kiri outside the tent, we had a brief conversation with our eyes across the 50 yard distance and she headed off to her next event in the knowledge that I too was happy! Buoyed by the uplifting show, the kids and I floated across the site to find some shade in which to eat our lunches, whilst I got a mild sinking feeling that we hadn’t packed any suncream! This was confirmed when Kiri found us a little later (despite no phone signal!), but there was no time to rectify this as I had a talk to attend and the trees were calling me.

I wasn’t really sure what this talk was going to be about – it was titled “My Child the Algorithm”, but it turned out it was a reading and exploration of a book of the same title created jointly between the speaker, their toddler and a Large Language Model as a piece of art from pre-ChatGPT days, exploring queer parenting. An era when these were simpler markov chains, easily getting into loops which could seem to create profound reflections such as:

“Fail to save the world as it is ought to be but, and this is the but…
fail to save the world as it is ought to be but, and this is the but…”

The “temperature” (i.e. how deterministic the response would be) had been tweaked on a sliding scale of accuracy to create “poetry”. This was not a technical talk, but more a journey through the philosophical musings of using an AI (the author prefers the term “alternative intelligence” rather than “artificial intelligence”) without anthropomorphism for a creative purpose. Some of the thought-provoking ponderings included:

• AIs can make us feel things, but those are our feelings, not feelings created by the AI
• How can we use AIs to elevate thinking rather than to just make things more efficient?
• A larger threat from AIs than the environmental impact is the lack of literacy around this tech that underpins all of social media, communications, online shopping etc
• AIs provide a mirror on society due to their training data… and companies try to put guardrails in place to make their outputs more palatable; this is equivalent to a racist person who has been told not to be racist
• How do we get passed the contradiction that we want to make AIs less biased… so we need to give them more training data… but we don’t want them using all of our data… so we’re less willing to share data for training?

Questioning why we choose to make our world increasingly complex, I left the trees behind and went for a wander. I didn’t try to find the others, but I succeeded anyway – they were all having fun with circus skills (still with no suncream). Our search for a place to purchase suncream was fruitless, but we bumped into a friend who happened to have some spare. Problem solved.

Further art called in the shape of… well, giant blocks representing neolithic stones, in a performance piece called Henge. Half an hour of high energy, high quality parkour, dance and acrobatics, showcasing the incredible abilities of the human body. There were parts of the performance that left each of us wide-eyed and open-mouthed as the artists balanced on each other and flung themselves through the air, sometimes from great height.

Hoping very much that our kids wouldn’t try to replicate what they’d just witnessed, we headed back to the tent for an early tea, via a bit of plate spinning at the circus skills. There was no mayo to go with our fajitas, but the pre-Greenbelt exclamation had obviously been forgotten and we chose not to broach the subject. I was trying to be very chill about arriving on time for the next talk I wanted to go to, as it had a title of “how to be a half-arsed human”, but it’s not massively my style. However, we passed the time lying on a picnic blanket listening to Good Habits doing a rendition of “Praise You” with three people playing one cello.

I arrived 5 minutes early. I couldn’t help myself. I wasn’t the first though, so clearly I’m not the only one who throws my full self into things. What followed was a bit of a marmite talk. Within the first 10 minutes I had decided I wasn’t on board with this talk and the concepts of not giving things your all, as it seemed really self-centric. The speaker talked about being the holder of “guilty vegan secrets” – avoiding eating meat sausages one day, so that a vegan friend could have some and overall equilibrium could remain. Do we throw ourselves fully into things because our imposter syndrome gremlins won’t allow us to do less, in the fear we’d be found to be incompetent?

However within the next 10 minutes I realised that many of the themes were less about “I” and more about “we”. If we half-commit to things WITH OTHERS, then things that we couldn’t do on our own are possible. If we’ve only got half our ourselves to bring to something, it means we’ve got space to bring someone else in. So what do these things look like in practice? Suggestions included putting goals in a grid rather than a list… then aiming for 3 in a row rather than ticking all of them off. I can see how that could work.

I still don’t know what I thought about the talk… but that’s the great thing about Greenbelt; being part of a discussion that you don’t necessarily agree with. What I did agree with Kiri though is it was time to get our youngest one back to camp, so whilst Kiri stayed on site ready to pick up the older kids from their group, I trudged back to the tent. It was hard to get the little one to sleep with punk melodies screaming through the site from the Rebel Rouser venue. Now I appreciate a bit of punk as much as the next person (although I’m perhaps the least anarchic person around… I’d love to help those anarchists be a bit more systematic; build processes and ways of working… but I guess that’s diametrically opposite to anarchism!), BUT… having the punk venue so close to the campsite was perhaps not the best choice?

After a much better, and warmer night’s sleep we woke just after 6 to the sound of corvids, and emerged at 7 for the standard morning routine. At 0930 I attended a quiet meditation with soundscapes, starting with turning to a person nearby and sharing a number from 1 to 10 to know where they’re coming from in any aspect of life. I like that. Two syllables. Nothing more needed. And then we were still. 30 minutes of birdsong, flute, a heartbeat. My mind was adrift for 15 minutes. Then 15 minutes a little more cerebral, reflecting on recent rest. Stacking wood at home. Physical repetition, but brain rest. Best 15 minutes of the festival thus far; not filling my brain with more stuff.

What better way to follow a slow, quiet meditation than several hours in the family tent?! The first was a science show that was… well, the closest to mediocre that Greenbelt gets. The poor performer was giving a demonstration about lung capacity and unknowingly selected a tuba player from the audience. But the kids enjoyed it.

We stayed in the tent to have our packed lunch whilst waiting for the next show – an Australian hula hooper with a show called “Lifesaver”. She was a highly talented entertainer, building great rapport with the crowd and interspersing jokes that soared over the kids’ heads (but tickled their parents) with accessible fun. And then I ended up being roped in. If she regretted choosing me due to my height (the finale was the 4 of us “volunteers” supporting on her our shoulders as she hula hooped on a surfboard… meaning the other 3 had to crouch down!), she hid it well. I think this might have been the first time I’ve ever performed the cancan on a stage…

The final entertainment in this tent was a masterpiece of relatable endeavour carried by natural showpersonship of Loz and Mark. This husband and wife team combined skilled circus performance with dry-witted banter throughout; whilst some of it must have been scripted, the running commentary felt like we were observing the planning of a show with tricks that might or might not work. Heckles of “did you do a risk assessment?” whilst spinning proper crockery plates were at the same time amusing, but also deeply insightful metaphors for parenting.

Somehow it was 4pm. What next? I’d totally lost track of what was on and where… and our youngest was asking to head back to camp. We picked up some sausages on the way, and had food ready by the time we were joined by Kiri and our eldest. After food we dropped the older child off for the “late night fun” and climbed the mound at Boughton House for the first time. I can’t believe we haven’t done it before at any previous Greenbelts – observing parts of the festival happen beneath us, with snippets of music carried on the wind. A lovely end to the Saturday.

Sunday morning started with a question of which food vans others in our group would recommend. The suggestions all sounded extremely tasty (Tibetan, paella, tartiflette), but impractical, as all were vans that had been present previous years, but not this year! However, we held onto hope that a tasty dinner would await us later in the day.

But first, a different kind of sustenance; the communion at the heart of the festival, where all walks of life gather to break bread together and hold onto a different kind of hope. The service was led by an 83 year old vicar who was facing terrorist charges for her support of Palestine Action and drew upon imagery of kintsugi – a Japanese art form of restoring broken pottery and gilding the mended cracks. Not hiding the brokenness, but celebrating the restoration. The same kind of concept as when we patch our jeans… but more artisan.

In our little circle where we shared bread, remembering Christ’s sacrifice for us and celebrating our own restoration, not all of the group would label themselves as believers. But the power in that simple act of communal reverence was stirring for all and one of the atheists in our group remarked that something special happened in that moment.

Once communion was over, Kiri took our youngest off to the loo and came back with a black eye (something to do with a child playing football). It was 11:30 and as we were sitting outside the Jesus Arms, it would have been impolite not to have a beer to accompany our cake. In homage to the black eye, we went for the Beijing Black, which we wanted to call Belgium Black for some reason (maybe because the Belgian flag has black in it but the Chinese flag doesn’t?). In any case, it was very tasty!

The afternoon was very chilled – we made kites with the kids, then as the kids flew their kites, the feathered version wheeled high above. We wandered around the orchard, overhearing a beatboxing lesson, watching willow-weaving. We bribed the kids with icecream whilst we listened to Josh Garrells and smiled wryly at a t-shirt with an apt Proverb “The tent of the upright will flourish”. The children contributed to a huge balloon dragon which paraded around the lawn – it was total mayhem with balloons popping all over the place as the dragon stretched. It only could have been dreamed up by an artist, but it was beautiful.

After watching an incredible bamboo show (a bit like Henge, but with bamboo) which was exhausting to watch, it was time for food fun. Firstly we queued for a pizza for the youngest… then went to get mac and cheese for our eldest… then a burger for Kiri… and finally a thali for me. Eventually we had all eaten and once the consumer of macaroni cheese had been dropped off for the final late night village, the rest of us snuggled down for a comfortable hour with Kate Rusby. We’re big fans – she’s such a cosy presence even with a huge crowd, that it feels like she’s just having a chat with you in the kitchen, with hands wrapped around a steaming mug of tea. A fitting closing act for our festival.

Our breakfast the final morning was quite possibly the peak breakfast of the weekend; scrambled eggs and beans on toast. There were ants in the honey, but a little extra protein and bite never did anyone any harm. Our eldest was very keen that we would be out of the festival on time, so we tried to make a plan, but agreed with the other campers in our party that vary rarely do plans survive first contact with the enemy. Which led us to muse what the enemy was… maybe life? A bit bleak, given the warmth and hope of the previous few days… so as we struck camp, seeking to leave only tentprints in the grass, we reflected on this place where we still our minds one minute and do the cancan the next, where we sit beneath the trees and contemplate implications of accelerating tech, where we share profound moments of faith together irrespective of our individual beliefs, we find each other without phones and we hold onto hope. That’s better!

We did make it out of the festival before 12, into a van with no air conditioning on a 30 degree day. Once the van was unpacked at home, there wasn’t even time to sit down before heading out to do the weekly food shop. Finally, after everyone showered and the kids were in bed, I sat down. Kiri came into the room and asked “are you going to have a shower?”. She sat beside me, looking very earnest, then rephrased it. “Please have a shower”.