The Visa Diaries

Lately, I have been really into “feeling my feelings.” Those of you who know me, know that I have a bit of a soft-spot for things leaning toward the “self-help” genre of things (only good quality self-help, to be fair). Feeling my feelings came from reading “Families and How to Survive Them” by Robin Skynner, a classic about family therapy, as well as “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle, a rather extreme neo-spiritual book about living in the here and now. Skynnard explains that as children we learn from our families that certain types of feelings are unacceptable, such as jealously, or failure, or anger, and then whenever we start to feel those things we have to repress them, leading to various sorts of problems. Tolle simply thinks that the doorway to all the aliveness and excitement that we are seeking by striving toward the future, actually lies in the here and now.

So anyway, psycho-woo-woo-ness aside, this feeling my feelings has been really working for me, and I have gotten so sanctimonious about it that I have even recently lectured two of my good friends to give up their avoidance and deflection techniques and just sit with their uncomfortable feelings. Under this new way of thinking, shopping would constitute just such an avoidance technique.

For example, imagine that it is a somewhat drippy, gray Sunday in London. I’ve had a nice lie-in, and don’t have much planned for the day. I spend some time surfing the net, have a nice breakfast, and then start to feel a bit glum, the Sunday blues kicking in. The thing to do would be to sit there with those blues, make a bit more room for melancholy in my life, not panic and resist it when it starts to show up, but instead get a little curious about it and just think, well, maybe this time is about being a little glum, and that’s ok.

The thing that I would *not* want to do, if I were trying to feel my feelings, would be to go shopping, because that buzz of a new purchase, the little fantasy (”oh the places I will go in these shoes?” “oh how chic will I look in this top!”) that goes along with it, would be covering up, distracting me from my underlying feeling. Then, as soon as the “purchase high” wears off, I’d be left right back where I started, except a bit poorer and perhaps with a new pair of shoes, rather than having gone through the feeling and being left with the deeper pleasure of having expanded my emotional range and comfort zone.

Or, in this case, I’d be left with some new skin care products, such as, hypothetically speaking, say a rosewater facial toner… errr, to be specific. I really didn’t mean to. I really was still feeling sanctimonious and ocnvinced about my new method. I just decided I would pop out and get a coffee, because, after all, one can certainly sip coffee and feel melancholy at the same time. But once on Portobello Road, the consumerist wonderland just sort of takes over. And I did need some new toner, because London tap water is so hard on the skin. So I stopped by Neal’s Yard – what could be the harm in that? Its all natural, apothecary-esque, full of herbs and essential oils. Neal’s Yard has been into that natural shit since long before Gwynnie or Madonna made it boho hip.

Anyway, I emerged the proud new owner of a rosewater facial toner, and with a slight buzz. Melancholy completely forgotten. So, I fell off the wagon… Does that mean I have to call my friends and come clean?

The summer music festival is a big deal in the UK. People spend weeks talking about Glastonbury, and if you’re going to Glastonbury, and how many people are going to Glastonbury, and what the locals think of Gastonbury, and how muddy it got at Glastonbury, and what Kate Moss wore at Glastonbury, etc etc. It is almost a bigger news event than Big Brother. Besides Glastonbury, there is a whole roster of other festivals, none nearly as iconic, but each tailored to a carefully targeted market demographic. In total they are a big part of the popular marking of the British summertime.

With all the hoop-la, I’ve always been interested in going to one. But I forgot to pack my tent and sleeping bag when I came over on the plane, amongst other obstacles, and so in four summers of living in London had never actually been to a festival. Until last weekend, that is. I am happy to report that I am no longer a festival virgin. When my friend Juliet not only invited me to go along with her group, but also offered a tent and a ride, it seemed that God had finally decided it was time for me to experience The Festival. The one He chose for me is the Big Chill, targeted, as Jules explained, for aging clubbers, who maybe used to rave in fields, but now are starting to have kids. It takes place in the lovely (formerly lovely, that is, before the invasion of 20,000 “chillers”) deer park of Eastnor Castle in the Malvern Hills.

For the Americans in the crowd, British festivals are a slightly different genre than ours. They are more intense than your Lollapaloozas, because they run over several days and involve camping out, but not quite as hardcore as something like Burning Man, because, well, its not the desert and you can buy things you forgot to bring. Its like a massive sleep-over at a country fair. No livestock or carnival games (not a Mole to Whack, sadly), and more music, but the same sort of feeling of a big field that might have recently hosted corn or grass or some other vegetable thing, now mainly a mud-flat for throngs of people milling between stalls, soundstages, generators, and port-a-potties. The field-cum-mud-flat quickly begins to sprout ends of sausages, cigarette butts, and other assorted litter to replace its former crop. The people eat and drink and mill and sit, then do it all again, and occasionally notice that they’re in what would be an idyllic field if it weren’t for all the other people. In my book “camping” involves fewer people and more nature, so this is something different. Maybe “festing”… if not “festering.”

At first I did not understand the point of the extra days. I mean, being at a fair for one afternoon is usually enough – you see all the sights, sample enough food to remind you that things prepared in trailers usually do not taste good, and rub shoulders with enough sweaty people wearing cowboy hats to sort of suffice until the next fair comes along. If you are lucky enough to need the port-a-loo during the afternoon, then you’ve really feel you’ve done country living, and enough is enough. We arrived Friday evening, had a great night of dancing to Kruder & Dorfmeister under the stars (only one of them was there – I don’t know if it was Kruder or Dorfmeister…), and by the middle of Saturday afternoon, this was how I was feeling – I’d had enough. Was no longer enchanted with the British middle classes and this ritualized hedonistic escape to the country. £125 (that’s over $250 earth dollars these days) to maybe imagine that you’re Janis Joplin at Woodstock or something, when really you’re Harriet who works as a PA in Slough. See, I was getting catty.

But you see, my problem on that first day was that I had gotten separated from my group. I had slept in, then wandered out and never found them. So I was looking at it all with the critical eye of a vaguely hung-over, dehydrated outsider. The beauty of the festival, I discovered, is the group dynamic, and that takes a couple of days to gel. Here I have to give a shout out to the best camp-mates ever, who totally welcomed me and feel like my-new-best-friends: Juliet, Dennis, Ceri, Sam, Giles, Manoj, Louise, Will, and our team leader, 18 month old Isabel (Dennis and Jules’ daughter, and the reason we camped in the Family area, where at least nobody pees on your tent). As soon as I rejoined them on Saturday evening, the festival just got better and better. By Saturday night, we and all the Big Chillers seemed to actually have chilled out, and were ready for a heaving outdoor party. I love a good dance under almost circumstance, so what can be better than brilliant music on a warm night in the open air with a delirious mood all around. The Idjut Boys started it off right at the SoCo Fat Tuesday stage then Hexstatic took over on the main stage. As the sky eased from indigo to black, people released those floating candle lanterns in the sky and all was magic. Instead of being nasty about PAs from Slough, I was starting to actually fancy myself more of a Janis Joplin. Ok, maybe not Janis, but like somebody all about being and feeling, rather than judging. That’s magic too.

By Sunday, the most beautiful day of the British summer so far, the festival had ripened and mellowed to a warm and fuzzy going and flowing. We ate, drank, chatted, joked, danced, sat around, wandered, split up, and rejoined. The arch of the weekend was like a good dj set: bringing a crowd up and getting it together may take some work, but then you get there, go a little crazy, and then come down long and luscious. At the tail end of the experience you feel open, emotional, spent and rejuvenated all at the same time.

In the hazy afterglow, I am festival convert. I’d do it all again in a heartbeat, buy my ticket now for next year. But only if Isabel is team leader, and if I can chill with the same campers.

I realize that that last post is quaintly anachronistic, because it is all about books without once mentioning the young wizard. I must admit I have not gotten into the globe-sweeping Potter-mania… probably for the same reaosn admitted below that i don’t actually end up reading too many of the books I buy. Alas, perhaps in five more years I’ll be writing about this *great new series* I have just gotten around to reading – have you heard of it? Its about Harry somebody…

Books inevitably appear more interesting in the store than at home on my shelf. In the shop, each book is a little present, a small, nicely wrapped package containing whole worlds and the collected wisdom of whole lives. If there’s one thing I love, its summary – the gleeful feeling that without having had to experience all the messy details, I’ve still gotten the top-line take-aways, thank you very much. Other people’s lives, with the dull bits and the overly stressful bits managed and distilled to a tightly controlled emotional pitch for my vicarious pleasure. Each book is an acquisition, not only of a whole other world, but of a more perfect world than the one I’m currently in, because it has been arranged by the author to make sense and hot all the right notes for my reading pleasure.

If a book is a summary of a whole world, then its cover is even more so – an intimation of that summary, a hint, a mood. The cover is the advert, the travel poster, for that other world. Book covers (along with CD covers and wine labels) are one of my favorite demonstrations of the power of graphic design – the actual product unfolds in time and cannot be communicated in the store, so they have to rely on the abstract summary provided by graphic design to sell themselves.

At home of course, books are much less appealing. After the initial allure of the cover, and the fond imagination it inspires of my newly acquired empire, has worn off, the book is just a big pile of little words begging for time and attention. The poor little forlorn book sits there reminding me, quietly, insistently, that I am not as not as well-read/ cultured/ whatever as I aspire to be. Or mainly maybe that just don’t have enough time, am too obsessed with all my petty obsessions, to open myself to the book’s new world. Whatever the case, I’d say a good 50% of the books on my shelf have not been read. Embarrassing. And weighty when you have to move, which I just did.

Well anyway, this post is about a purchase I made probably about eight years ago – a book called Truth and Lies in Advertising. I always meant to read it, even carted it with me from the US to London a couple of years ago. And now, what between tube journeys and a bit more free-time pst MFA, I’ve finally read it! Hallelujah! It was good – not earth shattering, but interesting. Whaddaya know.

Clearing up the back catalog feels good.