Fri- back to Southend to help in Village Green Festival

- Keith Baxter's band photo 2

- It's uncanny how the photo looks exactly like THE HOOT the hill billy jam outside the back of the Community radio station we used to go to on Tuesday nights in Adelaide Australia

Southend & Essex 2 : Westcliff-on-Sea, St Peter's, Bradwell On Sea, Burnham-on-Crouch - Fri - I arrived on the side by bus at about 4pm. It quite different from the folk festivals which I usually help at. I could see straight away they had big money available as they'd got paid security & marquee companies & security compaies for days of work. It seems they have a lot of grants so 1. they wanted to do everything by the book, (but they didn't really have the experience) and 2. they have a lot of paid workers to do stuff, not just volunteers. - I was fortunate to get a good nights sleeps at keith's house. on Sat - at the festival I ended up litter picking, only to find they had no proper litter plan & so the field end up a bit trashed, which meant there was a hell of a litter for us to pick up on Sunday. Still I suppose they gave the punters a good & safe festival. Well except for the fact that schedule hadn't properly been controlled & the hill billy band with Keith & his brother in started 45 minutes late and then they were yanked offstage midsong less than 20 minutes into their set. I wasn't really there for the acts, the only other one I wanted to see was John Hegley, but I missed him when I was busy sorting out the bins. - Sun & Mon - I went back to help with the clean up. They didn't need me really I guess as they had plenty of paid people. I don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me the event lost quite a bit of money.

Route 4 On Google

- Mon.. just left the Village Green festival site - The organisers METAL are a charity not commercial, but they seem to be grant chasers and hence have a lot of money to spend on marquee companies & security firms etc. - However my experience in Indian subcontinent makes me suspicious of such grant chaser charities as there can be ethical problems & corruption .. The money is not their on money like in a private business, but they end up with taxpayers money which benenfits the directors in salaries jobs for their friends etc. but they are not democratically accountable. - Strange syncronicity 2. - On Friday Keith made a point of showing me the newspaper article about Broomway walk the ancient path to Foulness across the sandbanks exposed at lowtide. Then on radio 4 today I suddenly hear a story about the very same walk Tues - EXPLORED DENGIE PENNINSULA : walked to Rayleigh, then got a bus to Battlesbridge, hitched to Burnham on Crouch, through to Bradwell, picked and ate cherries outside the nuclear power station, walked to St peters the church built out of the remains of a Roman Fort in 650AD.. don't know about the lowest light pollution claim, but the area is so flat it was practically light all night except when it rained, I camped under shelter... St. Peter-ad-Murum stands in a remote spot by the North Sea at Bradwell-on-Sea photos St Peter's Church taken from the sea..what you don't get from thephotos I can find is the flatness of the setting with flat flat sea & mud at one side & flat flat wheat fields at the other. People told me that this place is the best for astronomy as it has the lowest light pollution... that must be wrong many other areas are more remote..However the flatness meant that on this fullmoon night it was almost like daylight.

Wed - Maldon - The tourist office & library were shut, but there was a strange procession. Every year the East End Taxi drivers do a trip to bring special needs children. This year was the 60th anniversary. Wed - Keith-lookalike doing his job as Maldon mayor & the carnival princesses

Wed pm - Strange syncronicity 3. Two weeks ago I met Paddy who spent all his life working for Southend water. Today I went to the Museum of Power, which although it's in Lanford near Maldon turns out to be the old steam pump house owned by Southend water, which had giant steampumps to pump 96% of Southend's fresh water from here to the town. www.museumofpower.org.uk - www.museumofpower.org.uk - not very interesting tho

Thu - hitched thru Braintree & tried to hitch to Sudbury, but a kind woman who passed me on her way to collect her mother from the airport, picked me up on her way back & said Sudbury was boring, & insisted on driving me Lavenham where every house is wattle & daub. discoverlavenham.co.uk - then I hitched to Bury St Edmunds & visited the Greene King Brewery Museum... hitched to Thetford & Downham Market ..which was not so interesting ..just a base for farm worker immigrants. Fri - After abandoning idea to do Stamford festival - I woke up at 5am to find heavy rain .. at 8am set off to hitch .. but then I was lucky ..got a good lift with a couple test driving a car, then when the rain slacked I got a ride from a security man I had a further 70 miles to so I was expecting to have to find at least 2 more rides .."where are you going ?" Scunthorpe "Wow I'm going there aswell" ...so that was a bit lucky Festival Cancelled - I had been thinking of helping at Stamford festival http://www.riversidefestival.co.uk/ but given the rain forecasts I decided not to. Now I see it's been cancelled aswell as 4 other big fests Napton, Sheffield, M-Fest at Harewood, Stobart Summer Festival at Carlisle Racecourse