It took some bright labours to bump out of Tree Elbow, pack down the house, step away from our community responsibilities, and organise for the care of our animals with fine friends and neighbours. Some labour was the preserving of nourishing food for when we return home, knowing that we won’t always eat as we do at home over the duration of our pilgrimage to old Albion, Alba and Ériu.
Before dawn we checked off the last on our lists and walked with our packs to the town’s only bus stop, a fresh kilometre away. It was minus two degrees celsius.
We went into a weird and fatiguing twenty four hours of high energy industrial travel before we were sung into London town by our Devon friend, Steve. The Irish blessing he voice recorded went like this:
May the sun warm gently on your face,
the wind blow from behind.
The ground is soft in her embrace,
and all you meet be kind.
We were welcomed in by a friend‘s mother, Carole and her husband Ted,
who live not far from Primrose Hill. And when we’d rested, been fed and joyfully connected, Carole spoke ‘go climb it’, so we did and encountered Blake‘s ‘spiritual sun’.
We brought an offering to Albion,
and spread some salt from our Mother Country here. We let the ancestors know why we’ve come,
each of us oaken under our skin.
We wandered summer streets and found little gardens of intrigue,
where voices sing and bodies dance,
as it’s meant to be.
Next day we went back to Primrose Hill, a site of Druid procession, walked by ancestral Tilia entwined with Ulmus in the street,
to the home of Woody’s beloved cricket.
Here a love of a game – ancestral Yorkshire v Middlesex – commingled with unhappy accoutrements of Empire, including Father Time.
Woody gave a match report, which doubled as his encounter with this sacred site.
Still lagged by jet and tired and dreamy, we spent the third day in Brixton town, and gathered at The Remakery. Alice there timely asks, ‘what if we just make everything?’
We sat and yarned with friends Joel and Matt,
and left that happy place late, and crossed ancestral fox.
On the way to Blake at the Tate, we stopped by a garden of love, and chanced across a fellow admirer of the bard, Fergy, and we yarned and spoke and laughed.
Fergy accompanied us to Tate Britain, though Blake was scarcely there,
So we parted and journeyed to Bunhill Fields, where the old sage is buried,
We sang and sat and spoke to William, praised and offered him salt,
