R O B B E D

Ain't no more use dwelling with devastation, or swelling with enraged frustration, or welling up with every moment of lost memory - as it was all taken from me, that morning. 

What a tranquil and beautiful place it looks today, and how similar it appeared last night as we chugged back into town - but can you believe, that an actual crime scene this is. 

Ain't no use in dissecting the absence of every picture and film that I've taken , but might be worth attempting to fill in the missing blips between now + then. Then, as in, before. 

Before, the....

Oh.

Before before before before the nice people cut out a huge window pane out of our home + ran away into the sunset filled evening, with my precious precious and seemingly priceless camera + computer + all the nauseating baggage that comes with them. 

Full stop. Nowt can be done, move on. 

It might be worth remembering (perhaps selfishly to restore my own defunct memory, incapable of recording past processes unless they've been captured through a lens or endlessly drivvled on about..) the beautiful times that were enjoyed within this gaping gap in records (ah how I can't remember a time that I've been so obediently constant with a small project grappling around with the daily visuals). I suppose, maybe, possibly,  the sudden absence of my hundreds of photographs taken from Shambala Festival resolves the problem of deciding which, out of so many deliriously happy moments, would be selected to depict the pinnacle moment for each daily spread of hours between the dates of 23rd and 27th August. I had a homage, conjured up in my mind that would gracefully accompany a huge group picture of all of my delicious companions that I took on the 26th August, of whom each and every one of them played their unique parts to launch me up to the sky with shear overwhelming joy and gratitude - as it was my birthday. And  how aware they all were at my timidness regarding this particular day, so I was hoping that it would drift by in a subtle and small little acknowledgement, a shake of the hands perhaps or a nod in my direction, but instead I was greeted by a mass of gifts (most of them so wonderfully hand made, tailored specifically to suit the Spanface that they seem to know - so so well!) , songs, warm embraces, melting massages beneath the red hot sky, delicious eats + treats + pints of bubbly + then bubbly out of tea cup hair bands. At one point, when I was already hiding tears of joy beneath my wonky shades, a Post Woman approached our bundle of wonders, as we sat there by the lake on that radiating Sunday; "Um, is there a Spanface Smith here?" - after I'd finished cavorting around in bewildered disbelief, I was finally able to gratefully receive post of a spectacularly adorned card that appeared, as if by magic, out of the gyrating crowds of the festival.

Then there were the few days we spent at this weird little spooky trailer park trying to figure out our next moves - got some inexcusably nosey and possibly illegal pictures of the inhabitants of this unsettling little space in the world. It was dank, and dingy, and rainy - but it was a quiet space for us to attempt to stop spinning. I'm sad that I'm not able to share the stunning pictures of the toilet block that I took one night, positively quaking with fear at the surrounding unusual sounds that accompanied my late night wee, with the harsh fluorescent light quaking on + off in a fashion highly reminiscent of Aphex Twin's inside out film; Rubber Johnny - in fact, the whole experience felt a lot like that whole film - but maybe we just hadn't got enough sleep.

Anyway - after a thoroughly delectable stop over at our brill mate's wondrous huge house in Bristol, we finally made it over to LAMMAS, eco village conference all the way over in the far away realms of West Wales. After all the talking, and all the dreaming, and all the wondering, we were actually all of a sudden immersed in this fairytale place - where the houses are built in the hills and their fine stretches of land are covered in multicoloured foods. We had a whole weekend of learning the realities of initialising our own green living utopia, and shared it with big clusters of other wide eyed folk who seemed to be just as happy as we were to be discovering that this kind-of-out-there dream might. Just. Actually. Be. Possible. The round hobbit dwellings had been made with straw and mud and wood that they'd grown in their woodland. (Building stats - 3K, 2 months, 15 volunteers.) All of their power, naturally, comes from the sun and a hugely impressive Victorian hydro electric system that taps into the babbling stream that runs through their land. The children were playing with wild joy on their faces, ravaging the land and extracting every element to fuel their spiralling imaginations. The habitants appeared strong and welcoming, some of them looked like Robin Hood but some of them adhered to more 'normal' attire and worked with the surrounding communities. A complete dream. We couldn't wait to get back to our buds + share all of this highly encouraging information, and, erm, show them all the pictures I'd taken. Um.

These things happen, I suppose. And it's useful to focus on the positives. No one was hurt, it's only things. And it's a good reminder to keep your things safe. In big cities like this, it's not all hobbit latches on doors + bicycles sitting around chatting, unlocked, ready to be ridden again.