moonshadow

I thought it wasnt going to happen, all buses and trains travelling down to devon and cornwall on eclipse week were fully boked. I had to meet Luke in Plymouth at 8pm, but had no means of getting there. I spent Saturday crafting a huge ‘plymouth’ sign, complete with neon shiny sun face in a bid to hitch a ride there on Monday, it wasnt something I would normally consider, but I didnt want to miss the chance to sit in darkness for two minutes in the day. I even sent an email to 1,000 belle and sebastian fans to see if any rides were on, but alas, no response. Come Monday, I had a plan, get up early, try my hand at rail, gather my guesses at the bus station, and whip out my hitching twitching thumb from the holster of my pocket for a show down and a slow down with a friendly camper heading south west.

Imagine my surprise when I managed to get straight on, and a seat, on the first train I found leaving Paddington station! The warnings of traffic hell and food, water, accommodation shortages, coupled with the gloomy weather forecasts for eclipse day meant people stayed away in their droves, not turning up to take the seats they had booked.

A very pleasant train journey through the english countryside ensued, the highlight being a stretch of track which ran along the coast line, sea to my right, red clay cliffs to my left, and weaving in and out of tunnels blasted in the hills. I arrived in Plymouth at 3pm, and spent the afternoon in the sun strolling along the cobbled streets and harbour, watching the boats bob up and down below the cannon capped lookout of the citadel, where a replica of sir francis drakes seaship was moored. I met an odd bloke from preston, who talked at me for half an hour, about how he had picked up his unemployment giro cheque and gone back packing to cornwall to spend it, a pretty noble philosophy if you ask me, except I had the distinct impression he was lookig for a travelling buddy, so I was very coy about my plans. I left him while I could and sat at the end of a slipway, the water lapping at my feet, where I sat on my backpack and wrote to Heather as the sun went down.

I made it to the bus station for 8pm, after getting stuck in the harbour after making a wrong turn, where I waited two hours for luke. His bus finally arrived, after suffering a puncture mid way......only for me to find he wasnt on it, having of course missed his bus. I sat on the bench like forrest gump, and talked to a crazy old man, who I ended up finding used to work in advertising, making tv ads for coke, he told me that coke turned down john lennon for writing a tune to one of their ads because they didnt think he was cool enough! While the conversations I shared with this old man and the preston chap weren’t rivetting, they did help boost my faith in the fact that I WILL meet people on my australian travels, and that if I make th effort I can talk to strangers.

After three long wooden benched hours, luke arrived, Fortunately his parents picked us up by car, which was lucky as we had missed to last bus to our destination, and I was plotting which of Plymouths fine graveyards or roundabouts to camp in. He promptly left his sleeping bag from the galapagos isles in the coach luggage hold and off we went to whitsand bay......

Luke’s dad had a mexican food stand at the ‘moonshadow eclipse festival’ , a music and carnival extravaganza on the cornish clifftops, where about ten thousand people were expected to come and witness the phenomenom while having a beer fuelled weeklong party... In reality, the bad weather and poor publicity resulted in around 118 people showing up. So we spent the week in an eerily deserted festival, where you knew most of the festival goers by name, the majority of whom were working there.The funfair spun, illuminated but unadorned, the ferris wheel empty, the screams starngly absent. At least it meant the chemical toilets were visitable, and there were even showers!

Van Morrison played on the massive domed stage to about 80 people on Wednesday night, an easy 46,000 pounds for him, but he was a fat miserable git, and was rude to one of my new friends.

Cas was our first customer while luke and I served at the stand one morning, she gave us a smile, and we gave her coffee, she was helping out one of the bands- waulk electric- a family ‘electronic folk’ band with irish influence, didgeridoos and electric guitars. She had short brown hair, hippy thoughts, steel thumb clasp, a love of Tori and a whole bag of pixie dust, just my type. Later on she invited us to tea with her band, and luke and I sat around the gas canister, waiting for the kettle to whistle while the children bouced balls on my head, to polite smiles.

She literally bumped into Van backstage while helping set up her bands set, she apologised, and vans’ bodyguard informed her that no one addresses mr morisson directly, and they should go via him. What a twat! As a protest, Cas and I spent van’s gig with our backs to him, and didnt aplaude. She gave me some beer she stole from backstage, and we talked about how we could escape and go visit tori, and how annoying it is when the perfect line hits you, only find you have no pen and paper.I had a pen, she had some paper. Her band was on after as Van didnt want to play after 8.30pm, they were going to joke that van was the support act, but they were forbidden. I know who I would rather have seen. Hootini.

James, the dude with the didge (eridoo), joined the bongo drummers in the beer tent for an all night busk, strumming at his mandolin. He lft for bed at a reasonable hour, but the bongos were still bonging when I awoke at 7am.

Being in such a festival environment, despite the lack of attendees, I saw exactly how it was luke is the way he is. An army of nomads, circus folk, travellers, moving from festival to festival, not forming ties, openly friendly to all, even those they’ll never see again. Boxcar hobos, troubadors, their roots are buried deep in the topsoil of the last festival, just under the yellowed grass where the biggest marquee stood. Flying completely free, yet with tiring wings, and with every move their nest loses a few more twigs, without the constants who will reline their nest to call on, just those who laugh at your juggling, as long as the balls remain in the air.

With such a lack of attendees, security was lapse, and we went over, under and through the perimeter fence several times a day to cut short the route to our tent. We also managed to sneak in to the backstage performers beer tent, with a quick flash of the wrong coloured wrist band in the darkness, or in lukes case a rizzler gummed to his wrist. The backstage marquee was grand, in a tent like way. Sofas and settess, drapes, newspapers and dangling blue fabric light tube thingies, and a limitless supply of tea and coffee. There were also four cool pushdown desk lights on our table. By morning there was one, and no biscuits left in the tin for security- whoops!

Luke and I went for an exploratory walk, covering our tracks as we talked, trying to find a beach with an acceptable tidemark to paddle in, or a fast tide to take back something left on the sand, perhaps a lying landmine that could damage passers by. This took us across the dangerous rocky clifftops and through oppressive ministry of defence ground.

There was a sign on the fence saying: “Danger, troops in training, practice targets and live amunition” behind the sign was a field full of big brown cows, we wondered if they were the troops in training or the targets? All coves we found were inaccessable due to it being high tide, and due to the fact there is a very fine line between spontaneous guts and sheer stupidity, declined the idea of jumping in.

On our return from our fruitless swimtrip, we walked through a small clifftop village, lots of small wooden chalets with gardens and amazing views. We decided that if only we had one of these to retreat to at weekends London would seem much more inhabitable. One of the gardens had a table full of beer on it, and we gazed longingly with a walkers thirst. The man in the garden saw us, greeted us hello, and asked if we fancied a beer. I swiftly accepted and we both stepped foot on his spongy lawn. It was jack’s 70th birthday party, and all his family and relatives were there to wish him well. Luke and I bode him happy returns, but didnt hug him as were not sure how he would have reacted to two strange young men wandering into his home and touching him! Instead we sat in the garden with th younger of his family and drank in the stunning view and refreshing beer. Jack later told us of why beer tankers have glass bottoms, which I found very interesting. We told them how they could sneak into the big festival up the road they had been hearing about, but they didnt attempt it in the end...maybe because we didnt return their call? Either way, it was a nice afternoon spent in the lap of spontaneaity.

Finally the morning of the eclipse arrived. Us going to bed at 4am risked us missing it, so I set my alarm. I needn’t have bothered, as the kids in the tent next to ours reliably woke us up with their rendition of the star wars theme, yet again. The night before had not one cloud in the sky, and the twinkling of stars along the black i heavens shone a promise of hope over the grey forecast. As I peered out from the flap on the front of the tent, this hope punctured, like a beachball in a chinashop, after a taurean waltzing competition. Black and grey clouds filled the sky, not even a vague hue of light betrayed the location of our superstar del sol. We made no great effort to get up, and settlEd with a coffee outside the mexican food trailer with about twenty minutes to total eclipse. It was getting noticibly dimmer, but no more so than if the clouds were threatening to unzip and spill over us. It was quite surreal, a handful of us huddled around a picnic table, lukes mum had put a tv on the serving hatch, and we watched the eclipse on there, the shadow of the moon creep across the sun’s surface. With about five minutes to go, we decided that we hadn’t made this pilgrimage to cornwall just to watch tv, so we went and sat up on the hill, overlooking the sea and cornish coastline, with the port of plymouth in the distance. We called Kate spanglepantslove on lukes mobile, our long distance correspondent in london, for a status report on the capital, they could see the sun there, which was irritating, all of london was apparently out on the streets looking up at the sky, but it didnt get totally dark there, like it was about to where we were. We put on our solar viewers in some form of wanting to get our moneys worth out of them, but it just made the sky an ebony oil blanket. We noticed that when closing our eyes for five seconds and opening them again, everything seemed darker, unsure whether it was our minds or the sky we did it again, upon opening up it really did begin to get dark, very quickly, as if someone had reached for the dimmer switch and was lowering the lights to signal the arrival of a stage presence. There was no turning back , as within seconds we were plunged into bleak closure, and evryone cheered with excitement. Far off on the cliffs downshore, brilliant white flashes began rippling along the clifftops, shimmering in the darkness, as hundreds of witnessess captured the moment on camera, a wall of fairy dust and minature lighthouses, like the clifftop bonfires that warned of the armada fleet when it attacked, they heralded the descent of some larger pending presence. Most dramatic of all was the horizon. Out to sea was a perfect straight line, a thick band of orange glow all around us, where the daylight crept in from under the edge of the moons shadow, creating a 360 degree twilight. All too quickly the lights raised again, and cloudy daylight resumed. We all sat in silence, feeling a little cheated, a little inspired and with a large feeling of ‘what now?’. As if that was our reason for being, at least being there, but what would, what could, we do with our lives from that point? We sat a little longer, in the post eclipsial breeze, before getting up and walking down a dangerous cliff path to the beach. I have since found out that one of the little kids who was with Cas, and beating me with a ball, fell down that cliff the day we left, and had to get an air helicoptor ambulance to lift her off and to safety. Terrifying stuff.

We had success in finding a beach this time, and among the barnicle clad rocks, we found a tin of evaporated milk and some tuna fish in a rockpool. Luke and his brother sam played football again, and I drew shapes and wrote my email addres in the sand with an america online cd. They make good frisbees, once you block the hole with seaweed. Luke and I braved the prune inducing waters and swam for about five frigid minutes. We left the beach all too soon, and surfaced back to the empty festivities.

The rest of the day was an empty comedown, but with beer and football we made the most of it, until our weary bodies insisted that sleep really was an essential component to human existence and we surrendered. We left on Thursday morning, just to be an evil bitch, the sun came out and teased us, exactly 24 hours after we wanted her. We exacted revenge on the kids in the tent next door by leaning out of the front of ours and singing star wars out of tune until we woke them up.

Having given up hope of making any money, the funfair packed up and left, and we followed shortly after.

I didnt get a seat on the train home, so stood, leaning out of the window in the late morning sun, watching the world slide by, through eyes that had come a little closer to god, or at least more in acknowledgement of his presence. I found sleep huddled to my back pack on the floor of the train, and my heart sank when I left paddington station to the embrace of smog, tourists and frowns. I miss the clifftops, I miss the cows, I miss the sea and I miss being woken up by star wars in the morning.

The office merman with the five o’clock shadow

Mudsigh Jay



The Midmorning moonshadow I thought it wasnt going to happen, all buses and trains travelling down to devon and cornwall on eclipse week were fully boked. I had to meet Luke in Plymouth at 8pm, but had no means of getting there. I spent Saturday crafting a huge ‘plymouth’ sign, complete with neon shiny sun face in a bid to hitch a ride there on Monday, it wasnt something I would normally consider, but I didnt want to miss the chance to sit in darkness for two minutes in the day. I even sent an email to 1,000 belle and sebastian fans to see if any rides were on, but alas, no response. Come Monday, I had a plan, get up early, try my hand at rail, gather my guesses at the bus station, and whip out my hitching twitching thumb from the holster of my pocket for a show down and a slow down with a friendly camper heading south west. Imagine my surprise when I managed to get straight on, and a seat, on the first train I found leaving Paddington station! The warnings of traffic hell and food, water, accommodation shortages, coupled with the gloomy weather forecasts for eclipse day meant people stayed away in their droves, not turning up to take the seats they had booked. A very pleasant train journey through the english countryside ensued, the highlight being a stretch of track which ran along the coast line, sea to my right, red clay cliffs to my left, and weaving in and out of tunnels blasted in the hills. I arrived in Plymouth at 3pm, and spent the afternoon in the sun strolling along the cobbled streets and harbour, watching the boats bob up and down below the cannon capped lookout of the citadel, where a replica of sir francis drakes seaship was moored. I met an odd bloke from preston, who talked at me for half an hour, about how he had picked up his unemployment giro cheque and gone back packing to cornwall to spend it, a pretty noble philosophy if you ask me, except I had the distinct impression he was lookig for a travelling buddy, so I was very coy about my plans. I left him while I could and sat at the end of a slipway, the water lapping at my feet, where I sat on my backpack and wrote to Heather as the sun went down. I made it to the bus station for 8pm, after getting stuck in the harbour after making a wrong turn, where I waited two hours for luke. His bus finally arrived, after suffering a puncture mid way......only for me to find he wasnt on it, having of course missed his bus. I sat on the bench like forrest gump, and talked to a crazy old man, who I ended up finding used to work in advertising, making tv ads for coke, he told me that coke turned down john lennon for writing a tune to one of their ads because they didnt think he was cool enough! While the conversations I shared with this old man and the preston chap weren’t rivetting, they did help boost my faith in the fact that I WILL meet people on my australian travels, and that if I make th effort I can talk to strangers. After three long wooden benched hours, luke arrived, Fortunately his parents picked us up by car, which was lucky as we had missed to last bus to our destination, and I was plotting which of Plymouths fine graveyards or roundabouts to camp in. He promptly left his sleeping bag from the galapagos isles in the coach luggage hold and off we went to whitsand bay...... Luke’s dad had a mexican food stand at the ‘moonshadow eclipse festival’ , a music and carnival extravaganza on the cornish clifftops, where about ten thousand people were expected to come and witness the phenomenom while having a beer fuelled weeklong party... In reality, the bad weather and poor publicity resulted in around 118 people showing up. So we spent the week in an eerily deserted festival, where you knew most of the festival goers by name, the majority of whom were working there.The funfair spun, illuminated but unadorned, the ferris wheel empty, the screams starngly absent. At least it meant the chemical toilets were visitable, and there were even showers! Van Morrison played on the massive domed stage to about 80 people on Wednesday night, an easy 46,000 pounds for him, but he was a fat miserable git, and was rude to one of my new friends. Cas was our first customer while luke and I served at the stand one morning, she gave us a smile, and we gave her coffee, she was helping out one of the bands- waulk electric- a family ‘electronic folk’ band with irish influence, didgeridoos and electric guitars. She had short brown hair, hippy thoughts, steel thumb clasp, a love of Tori and a whole bag of pixie dust, just my type. Later on she invited us to tea with her band, and luke and I sat around the gas canister, waiting for the kettle to whistle while the children bouced balls on my head, to polite smiles. She literally bumped into Van backstage while helping set up her bands set, she apologised, and vans’ bodyguard informed her that no one addresses mr morisson directly, and they should go via him. What a twat! As a protest, Cas and I spent van’s gig with our backs to him, and didnt aplaude. She gave me some beer she stole from backstage, and we talked about how we could escape and go visit tori, and how annoying it is when the perfect line hits you, only find you have no pen and paper.I had a pen, she had some paper. Her band was on after as Van didnt want to play after 8.30pm, they were going to joke that van was the support act, but they were forbidden. I know who I would rather have seen. Hootini. James, the dude with the didge (eridoo), joined the bongo drummers in the beer tent for an all night busk, strumming at his mandolin. He lft for bed at a reasonable hour, but the bongos were still bonging when I awoke at 7am. Being in such a festival environment, despite the lack of attendees, I saw exactly how it was luke is the way he is. An army of nomads, circus folk, travellers, moving from festival to festival, not forming ties, openly friendly to all, even those they’ll never see again. Boxcar hobos, troubadors, their roots are buried deep in the topsoil of the last festival, just under the yellowed grass where the biggest marquee stood. Flying completely free, yet with tiring wings, and with every move their nest loses a few more twigs, without the constants who will reline their nest to call on, just those who laugh at your juggling, as long as the balls remain in the air. With such a lack of attendees, security was lapse, and we went over, under and through the perimeter fence several times a day to cut short the route to our tent. We also managed to sneak in to the backstage performers beer tent, with a quick flash of the wrong coloured wrist band in the darkness, or in lukes case a rizzler gummed to his wrist. The backstage marquee was grand, in a tent like way. Sofas and settess, drapes, newspapers and dangling blue fabric light tube thingies, and a limitless supply of tea and coffee. There were also four cool pushdown desk lights on our table. By morning there was one, and no biscuits left in the tin for security- whoops! Luke and I went for an exploratory walk, covering our tracks as we talked, trying to find a beach with an acceptable tidemark to paddle in, or a fast tide to take back something left on the sand, perhaps a lying landmine that could damage passers by. This took us across the dangerous rocky clifftops and through oppressive ministry of defence ground. There was a sign on the fence saying: “Danger, troops in training, practice targets and live amunition” behind the sign was a field full of big brown cows, we wondered if they were the troops in training or the targets? All coves we found were inaccessable due to it being high tide, and due to the fact there is a very fine line between spontaneous guts and sheer stupidity, declined the idea of jumping in. On our return from our fruitless swimtrip, we walked through a small clifftop village, lots of small wooden chalets with gardens and amazing views. We decided that if only we had one of these to retreat to at weekends London would seem much more inhabitable. One of the gardens had a table full of beer on it, and we gazed longingly with a walkers thirst. The man in the garden saw us, greeted us hello, and asked if we fancied a beer. I swiftly accepted and we both stepped foot on his spongy lawn. It was jack’s 70th birthday party, and all his family and relatives were there to wish him well. Luke and I bode him happy returns, but didnt hug him as were not sure how he would have reacted to two strange young men wandering into his home and touching him! Instead we sat in the garden with th younger of his family and drank in the stunning view and refreshing beer. Jack later told us of why beer tankers have glass bottoms, which I found very interesting. We told them how they could sneak into the big festival up the road they had been hearing about, but they didnt attempt it in the end...maybe because we didnt return their call? Either way, it was a nice afternoon spent in the lap of spontaneaity. Finally the morning of the eclipse arrived. Us going to bed at 4am risked us missing it, so I set my alarm. I needn’t have bothered, as the kids in the tent next to ours reliably woke us up with their rendition of the star wars theme, yet again. The night before had not one cloud in the sky, and the twinkling of stars along the black i heavens shone a promise of hope over the grey forecast. As I peered out from the flap on the front of the tent, this hope punctured, like a beachball in a chinashop, after a taurean waltzing competition. Black and grey clouds filled the sky, not even a vague hue of light betrayed the location of our superstar del sol. We made no great effort to get up, and settlEd with a coffee outside the mexican food trailer with about twenty minutes to total eclipse. It was getting noticibly dimmer, but no more so than if the clouds were threatening to unzip and spill over us. It was quite surreal, a handful of us huddled around a picnic table, lukes mum had put a tv on the serving hatch, and we watched the eclipse on there, the shadow of the moon creep across the sun’s surface. With about five minutes to go, we decided that we hadn’t made this pilgrimage to cornwall just to watch tv, so we went and sat up on the hill, overlooking the sea and cornish coastline, with the port of plymouth in the distance. We called Kate spanglepantslove on lukes mobile, our long distance correspondent in london, for a status report on the capital, they could see the sun there, which was irritating, all of london was apparently out on the streets looking up at the sky, but it didnt get totally dark there, like it was about to where we were. We put on our solar viewers in some form of wanting to get our moneys worth out of them, but it just made the sky an ebony oil blanket. We noticed that when closing our eyes for five seconds and opening them again, everything seemed darker, unsure whether it was our minds or the sky we did it again, upon opening up it really did begin to get dark, very quickly, as if someone had reached for the dimmer switch and was lowering the lights to signal the arrival of a stage presence. There was no turning back , as within seconds we were plunged into bleak closure, and evryone cheered with excitement. Far off on the cliffs downshore, brilliant white flashes began rippling along the clifftops, shimmering in the darkness, as hundreds of witnessess captured the moment on camera, a wall of fairy dust and minature lighthouses, like the clifftop bonfires that warned of the armada fleet when it attacked, they heralded the descent of some larger pending presence. Most dramatic of all was the horizon. Out to sea was a perfect straight line, a thick band of orange glow all around us, where the daylight crept in from under the edge of the moons shadow, creating a 360 degree twilight. All too quickly the lights raised again, and cloudy daylight resumed. We all sat in silence, feeling a little cheated, a little inspired and with a large feeling of ‘what now?’. As if that was our reason for being, at least being there, but what would, what could, we do with our lives from that point? We sat a little longer, in the post eclipsial breeze, before getting up and walking down a dangerous cliff path to the beach. I have since found out that one of the little kids who was with Cas, and beating me with a ball, fell down that cliff the day we left, and had to get an air helicoptor ambulance to lift her off and to safety. Terrifying stuff. We had success in finding a beach this time, and among the barnicle clad rocks, we found a tin of evaporated milk and some tuna fish in a rockpool. Luke and his brother sam played football again, and I drew shapes and wrote my email addres in the sand with an america online cd. They make good frisbees, once you block the hole with seaweed. Luke and I braved the prune inducing waters and swam for about five frigid minutes. We left the beach all too soon, and surfaced back to the empty festivities. The rest of the day was an empty comedown, but with beer and football we made the most of it, until our weary bodies insisted that sleep really was an essential component to human existence and we surrendered. We left on Thursday morning, just to be an evil bitch, the sun came out and teased us, exactly 24 hours after we wanted her. We exacted revenge on the kids in the tent next door by leaning out of the front of ours and singing star wars out of tune until we woke them up. Having given up hope of making any money, the funfair packed up and left, and we followed shortly after. I didnt get a seat on the train home, so stood, leaning out of the window in the late morning sun, watching the world slide by, through eyes that had come a little closer to god, or at least more in acknowledgement of his presence. I found sleep huddled to my back pack on the floor of the train, and my heart sank when I left paddington station to the embrace of smog, tourists and frowns. I miss the clifftops, I miss the cows, I miss the sea and I miss being woken up by star wars in the morning. The office merman with the five o’clock shadow Mudsigh Jay

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