Forest Moves

A long time ago – 808’s were still a novelty; there were police squads roving the land, looking for trouble post-Beanfield, banging on the big bass riot-shield – I was coming of age, out of the teen swill and I was bargaining with the new angel/devil mix of speed and LSD – ten or twelve of us (including: Poet Mark, Angela, Stu, Smiley Tim, Turningworm Jayne, ‘Em’ Emma, Sir Clifford Rees, my brother and some others besides) piled into the back of Angela’s red van and Smiley Tim’s swag wagon, wheels clunking on over-weighted axles – shucks – the wily stars of spring just blooming of an evening and riding the tinted windows with us; left on a kind of magical mystery tour (Stu whistling Krautrock riffs as he dowsed his first tab with Ribena) returning to yesterday – we kicked off heading north from Hertfordshire via Royston, catching up with the Roman road somewhere around St. Neots maybe, until we wound up truly lost in Thetford Forest without any idea how we got there or how to get out - following dark tracks into the woodland, at the end of which we’d reach sinister wire grilles with giant red words ‘MOD Property Keep Out’ spread there like we’d stepped into another land, some South American banana republic or something under the thumb of a strict n’ sinister military junta (well actually we were! Only we didn’t need to go to Nicaragua for e.g.) – Angela started to cry, exasperated (she was coming up) and all she wanted was to get into the open with the Roe deer we’d seen ambling and scatter as we drove through their significant hideaways, eyes shining twilit. Eventually we found a glade, god knows how, but there was a streak of light and the smell of warm earth there and enough room to park the vehicles and build a fire and tell stories and wag and dance – Tim piped up the swag wagon’s speakers and laid us all out with some chiming and we strayed into the shadows or broke the night with wild reflections of the fire on our faces whenever we stood close to it – and stray creatures watched from just beyond our claimed territory, I could hear them breathing and their hearts pumped into mine (but that might just have been the drugs) – and Jayne held my hand and we discovered the fallen bole of a tree and used it to drum along to Tim’s swaggering beats and the wood seemed to breath out with us and throw back that hollow noise, right up to the first swatches of dawn through it’s canopy, whereupon we all crashed out round the fire under sleeping bags and polythene coverings; Poet Mark set us all up for snoozing with his tales of love, his paeans to Orwell and the meaning of self-will and the new scriptures of modern bohemia (he was good that way) and then it was my turn and all I could do was sound idiotically profound and so we all laughed until we dozed and the warmth of the day began to search through the coolness of the tree cover. The first dog-walkers started to arrive frowning at this bunch of chilled fools before them, this refugee camp for the intoxicated. Some tutted and claimed us as disgusting, others were bemused and amused and waved and whispered to each other because this was the like of which they hadn’t seen – eventually I strode off alone, trying to find where all these domestics were coming from and discovered we were camped not far from the edge of a kind of park with what looked like a stately home at the far end and that, this being the middle of the week, people were out walking their pets before they headed off to work or mooched back for housekeeping – it was odd (joyfully) to turn back and see that camp of good-lookers and musical urchins nestled into the boles of trees, the leaf matter for pillows and the soft bloom of some ambient track spilling out and grinning good morning and to turn around again and see suburbia holding its hand up and waving and wondering why it hadn’t quite ever been as halcyon as what it had just witnessed. And last night I found myself driving once again through the Forest for the first time since then - all those faces came back to me, those memories and I began to perceive that my life was pretty rich despite the hounding money chasers and the municipal Greys and the calls from credit card dealers and and and . . . now I'm there with newer friends, newer fools, older, maybe wiser, but who can tell??