Today I drove to Wollens, the local builders merchants, in my camper to pick up two bags of plaster so the Yorkshireman can finish off the ceiling. Wollens feels about as out of the Glastonbury vortex as you can get, it’s on the trading estate, next to the Industrial estate, next door to the gigantic Tesco and opposite KFC and  Domino’s Pizza. You could be on the edge of any UK town here, there’s not a crystal shop or a rainbow unicorn to be seen. Wollens is full of bulky, serious looking men with tape measures hanging from their belts, talking about bib tap wall flanges and coach bolts.

The Yorkshireman goes to pay while I drive round to the bay where the plaster and lime and sand and all the other buildery type stuff that comes in bags is kept. Winter has properly set in, there is freezing fog, the temperature is in minus figures and the the yard is pretty quiet except for the staff in thick jumpers, overalls and woolly hats rubbing their hands together and looking generally chilly.

A builder’s flat bed truck pulls up behind me as the Yorkshireman comes back, and the driver jumps out and greets him. I recognise him as the middle aged bloke who collected a load of builders waste the other day from the garden. I remember that I met him a couple of years ago when I went to my lockup and he was at his lockup opposite, he was loading in a motorbike he’d just bought. Also, I once knocked on his door to enquire about the campervan that was for sale on his drive.

All these brief meetings have led me to assume that he is your standard, ordinary, down to earth, bloke.

I can just hear their conversation. He asks how the van is going as we’d only just bought it when we met him at the lock-up. Obviously, he goes on to talk about the weather and the minus temperatures. He’s asking the Yorkshireman how the plastering is going, whether the plaster is going off OK in the cold. He starts talking about working with resin, how he had to heat it up before he could pour it into the moulds. I wonder what he has been making, I can’t think of many buildery type things that use resin. Seems like I’m going to find out though, as he’s running back to the pick-up truck to get a sample for the Yorkshireman.

The Yorkshireman comes back with two small, round orgone generators and drops them onto the dashboard, looking slightly perplexed. Normal, middle aged, straight looking builder bloke comes over to my open van window “See how you get on with those, I’ve made hundreds. I gave one to my accountant, wow the energy they give off is phenomenal, he didn’t even know what it was and he couldn’t handle the energy, it was too much for him, it fell straight out of his hand. Come round to my house, I’ve got a gallery of them, I want to show you”. I smile and nod and start up the van.

As we leave the Yorkshireman asks “What are these things?” I explain that they are orgone generators, invented by Wilhelm Reich, made out of resin and metal and crystals and believed by some to cure illness, drive away negativity and clear up chemtrails.

I am beginning to conclude that there is Nothing Normal in Glastonbury.

You can read Wikipedia’s sceptical definition of Orgone, and a handy guide to selecting a ‘true working’ orgone energy generator in this Ebay Guide.

Glastonbury based author Paul Weston lectures on the psychogeography of the Wirral Park Roundabout near Wollens. On his Avalonian Aeon website he says “It is as if a strange membrane exists between mythic Glastonbury and the relentless spread of non-places that attempt to impinge upon it.” You can buy his book ‘Glastonbury Psychogeography: History. Mythology. Occult. Literature. Harmony and Horror. The Living Presence of the Past’ by clicking on the photo to the right.

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