Dispatches from the Sceptic Fields

It’s Shakin’ Stevens o’clock here at Glastonbury. Lunchtime. Saturday, as we emerge from the first full day of hard core mud action.

It’s not my first time here. I am not wearing flip flops and I did not bring a suitcase. My first visit was in the (coughs) mid eighties. Many things have changed. Gone are the rows of blackboards advertising various alternative pharmaceuticals. No more communal showers. There are now onsite loo cleaners.

Somethings don’t change. Norman Cook in various guises. Billy Bragg is still fighting the miners strike. Rain.

The healing fields are a permanent fixture. Somehow, in order to become a member of the alternative culture there is a package of beliefs you have to buy into. Worrying about oil consumption in the greenpeace fields means that you have to empty your brain when worrying about providing health for people. GM crops. Bad. No debate. Nuclear power – nein danke.

So, I was offered Nux vomica for my hangover by a crystal therapist. I love the sincerity streaming from her. More disturbingly, I see I can get a dispossession if I have a serious mental illness.

So I am setting up the Sceptic Fields here now. There are just a few of us. With a cup of refreshment from the cider bus. We are enjoying not feeling the vibes. Should we do a double blind randomised controlled test in the stone circle? I feel a bit of a killjoy.

8 comments

censored 28th June, 2008 11:57 am

An wonderful post that accurately conveys the amount of scrumpy in your bloodstream!

All these are things that I’ve thought to myself over the years. I left the Greenfields last year, as the Homeopathic Roadshow was just too much for me.

For once, though, I have to go along with peace and love and live and let live. It’s Glastonbury: a drunk man’s idea of a perfect world, and I find it hard to disagree.

BillyJoe 28th June, 2008 10:03 pm

Do you know what happens when you clog your arteries? You have a heart attack, or a stroke, or you lose a leg or two.

And do you know what happens when you clog your veins? Elephant man anyone?

And your cerbrospinal fluid channels? It squeezes your brain so that it don’t work too good anymore.

But before that happens, try to imagine what it would mean for you to have your energy flows clogged.

It does not bear thinking.

ChilledoutChemist 29th June, 2008 9:20 pm

I hope that you managed to chill out in the end. Not everybody sees the world as you do and you do like getting at some harmless easy targets. I bet that you wont though start writing sarcastic comments about those more likely to react. No chance of you standing outside Finsbury Park mosque advising everybody that science expalins it all.
Better you stick to slagging crystal healers I think.

Joseph Hewitt 30th June, 2008 3:27 am

You’re not a killjoy. You’re just having a different kind of fun. The sort of fun that can be rigorously defended. If those squares can’t dig it that’s their problem.

Bill S. Preston Esq. 30th June, 2008 4:46 pm

I presume you were actually offered a homeopathic preparation of Nux Vomica (strychnine). Which is to say, you were not offered Nux Vomica.

Peter in Dundee 2nd July, 2008 5:46 am

Well no posts since, so maybe it was Nux Vomica, straight and in a scrumpy induced hazy spirit of enquiry he tried it….

As for standing outside the Mosque, that would be crass and impolite. As the bumber sticker has it: Don’t pray in my school and I won’t think in your church. But if they step outside of the freedom to worship and start trying to impose something on someone else, then we are entitled to step in.

Anonymous 24th July, 2008 11:49 am

And did the homeopathic preparation of Nux Vomica help the hangover?

homeopathy4health

Anonymous 24th July, 2008 12:08 pm

Ok, read it again, you were ‘offered’ and didn’t take.
H4H