Back in the day, about a hundred years ago, I went to Glastonbury Festival. Soon after arriving, my boyfriend and I broke up and I tramped across miles of tent-crammed fields looking for my other friends. It was boiling by day and freezing by night, and there were far too many people in one place, […]
Last summer, I decided to visit Glastonbury for the first time. The place, as the heart of the county bordering on my native Gloucestershire, had long intrigued me. And, as somewhere that claimed to be a special spiritual place, I wanted to get under its skin, to take a kind of experiential snapshot. According to […]
This week sees two of the most worthwhile events of my year – Dying Matters Awareness Week and the Eurovision Song Contest. An incongruous coupling, I know; I’ll try to explain. I came across the campaigning organisation Dying Matters a few years ago in the wake of the death of both my parents and an […]
It was a fitting setting for a thinker whose interests span evolution and angels. On a January evening in the Unitarian Church in Notting Hill. Maggie Stanway, chair of the Jung Club (which was hosting the event), lit a candle and introduced the renegade biologist Rupert Sheldrake. Sheldrake, who is tall and has a posh […]
It takes a lot to make me leave my local habitat in mid-November, but this year I was lured across the flatlands to attend the New Networks for Nature conference in Stamford. The multi-disciplinary forum brings together writers, scientists and creative people of all kinds to share their responses to the natural world. Now in […]
What is it about hills? For no obvious reason, they continue to exert a powerful influence over us, just as they did over our ancestors. A testament to what religious historian Mircea Eliade called ‘an almost universal belief in a celestial divine being’, they’ve drawn people up to hold religious ceremonies, live as hermits or […]
2014 brings the centenary of the start of World War One, and the beginning of four years of national commemorations. It’s telling that, in writing that sentence, I nearly typed ‘celebrations’ instead of ‘commemorations’. For the official discourse about the war has a triumphalist tone, one which perfectly expresses a nationalist narrative about the greatness […]
Barbara Ehrenreich’s Living with a Wild God presents the reader with a puzzle. While on a road trip to Death Valley at the age of seventeen, the author has what anyone with the faintest interest in the spiritual will immediately recognise as a mystical experience – a feeling of ecstasy, terrifying awe and a vision of the […]
I’m thrilled that Springwatch is back on our screens. During the three-week outside broadcast, hidden cameras bring the secret life of the creatures around us right into our living rooms, providing the nation with a rare opportunity to watch live TV together. The popularity of the programme – now in its tenth year, having spawned the sibling broadcasts […]