Touring With Trolls

Reflections from five weeks on the road in Denmark, England, Scotland, and Ireland

Almost every time I do a tour of any length, I feel inspired at the end of it to write a bit of a travelogue about it when it's over. But almost every time I set out to do a tour, I'm thinking this time I won't bother writing something about it at the end. After all, I find myself thinking, I'm just going to the same countries I've toured in before so many times, including just over the past year. How much more is there to say?

Of course we're both answering my question as I'm asking it. From space, Denmark and England look pretty similar, little green places surrounded by water. But when you get up close to them, they're very different, and they're also changing all the time, particularly in terms of what the humans in those places are up to. And when what you're getting is a snapshot of life as it is now, and as it has changed within the space of 6 or 8 months since the last visit, I find there are always interesting observations to be made, despite the fact that I'm generally visiting the same small group of countries, but also because of that fact.

With this tour, I made the unusual move (for me) of writing a sort of travelogue about the tour before it happened. I wrote a post called Anatomy of a Concert Tour about five weeks ago, just before leaving for the tour, about why I ended up touring in these countries in the first place, and about some of the folks who were organizing different gigs in different places, and how I met them. So this could be part 2 in a two-part series on the subject of this spring 2023 tour of (parts of) northwestern Europe, the part about what really happened after the plans were laid.

First of all, for those intrigued by the title who may be wondering, I won't keep you in suspense: none of my gigs were canceled, and there were some that materialized in the time since I wrote the tour prequel post. But this was not due to lack of effort on the part of cancellation campaigners, evidently from a variety of political stripes, and beyond efforts at canceling my gigs, the tour took place in a general atmosphere that could sometimes be characterized by the behavior of the morally outraged cancellation campaigner, and the fear and confusion that tends to result from being targeted by such efforts, if you're a gig organizer or a fellow performer on the bill with, say, me. As Kamala and I traveled, we were continually encountering other artists, organizers, and of course former members of the British Labor Party, who were facing the same sorts of attacks.

One of the many interesting things about traveling to different countries is having the chance to contrast them with each other. Similarities are easy to find everywhere, but so are differences. One contrast between all of these five weeks in Europe compared to the much briefer tour on the west coast of the US we did together in February is in the US we encountered five different incidents of road rage directed at us, for no apparent reason, whereas in Europe this sort of thing never happened. There was traffic, there were occasionally aggressive drivers, especially in big cities like London, but no one yelling at us from behind their steering wheels, not once.

The tour began in Denmark. In the broader context of my reality and the world at large, fires were burning out of control across Canada and causing New York and Boston to have some of the world's worst air quality. The war was raging in Ukraine, my friend Medea Benjamin had just published a book about it, and was getting violently attacked at book talks by self-described anarchists in Minneapolis. And millions of French people were in the streets, protesting Macron's latest effort at raising the retirement age there. Everywhere we went, every day, at some point someone would mention the protests in France and smile wistfully, saying something about how they wished people would pour into the streets in such numbers in their country.

Coming from the extremely stressed streets of Portland, with the ranks of the unhoused living and dying on the sidewalks in every direction, and people driven mad by such circumstances visibly flipping out in one form or another every couple of blocks, landing in Denmark is a lot like passing through the Pearly Gates. Suddenly, everyone appears to be calm and relaxed, even happy, in a quiet sort of way. The lack of stress in the air is palpable, the feeling that you're in a safe place causes my shoulders to unhunch for the duration.

Usually you can even observe in Copenhagen and elsewhere in Denmark that this air of general contentment extends to the children and babies. In the airport this was immediately evident. Rather than the scenes you'll so often witness in the US, England, or Ireland, of stern parents scolding their children for daring to complain that they're tired of sitting in their stroller, in Denmark you're far more likely to see a parent or grandparent dancing with a happy toddler in the boarding area.

On this trip to Denmark I observed a number of cases of young children really freaking out, having what some would identify as a tantrum, or what more sympathetic people might identify as a child that is severely emotionally disregulated and in need of a lot of support and empathy. In places like Denmark, stress levels for small children don't often reach the tantrum stage, as they so often do in parts of the world where good parenting is less commonplace. But on this trip I observed a bunch of incidents that would have been less familiar in past times. I wondered how many of the kids were actually Ukrainian refugees and how many were Danish, but I never stopped to ask the parties involved, and in all but one case I couldn't tell where the little blond children or their blond parents were from.

The first stop in Copenhagen was to pick up Anne Feeney's guitar at Jan's place, where I had left it on my last visit to the region, so that I could travel without a guitar on this visit, pick up Anne's guitar in Copenhagen, use it on the tour, and then take it safely back to the United States so it could finally find its way to Anne's daughter, Amy.    

Armed with the instrument, we headed towards Ungdomshuset. It was Kamala's first visit to the legendary Youth House, and the evening lived up to punk rock social center expectations, with lots young folks with piercings and tattoos smoking cigarettes and throwing ice cubes at each other with alarming force, possibly a new stage in the evolution of moshing in Scandinavia, I don't know. It was a fine crowd at Ungdomshuset, but some folks were missing, and having heard about the Ungdomshuset folks once again being contacted by my trolls, I wondered why. Likely just not a whole lot of publicity for the gig.

Folks came from as far away as southern Germany to the gig at Ungdomshuset, including one of the members of a great band from a small town near Munich. It's somehow not unusual for folks to travel long distances to catch a gig, but always very touching when it happens, even if it might have just been a decent excuse for a road trip.

We traveled across the country to play in the section of Aarhus that is home to the wooden boat community, a wonderful bunch of folks, some of whom look exactly like you'd imagine the captain of a ship to look. In Aarhus and at the remaining shows in Copenhagen and Roskilde, crowds packed in and sang along boisterously. Especially in Aarhus, where a significant percentage of the audience were a group of fine upstanding punks who got there just before showtime, several of whom were very drunk upon arrival, and intent on drinking more.

The reason why I extended what was originally going to be a month-long tour of Britain and Ireland and included another visit to Denmark in the plan was that I had been invited to play at the Ild i Gilden festival in Roskilde, which is billed in English as an acoustic music festival. That's all we really knew about the festival before we got there. Upon arrival, what we found was a festival very oriented towards traditional Scandinavian folk music, with more highly skilled fiddle players in one place than I had seen in a long time.

Soon after we got there I also discovered that I knew some of the folks who lived on the festival grounds, and that the festival grounds are right next to the land that the far, far larger Roskilde Festival takes place on every year.

The land and the music was all fabulous, but I wondered how our very contemporary set of politically-oriented music was going to go over among this crowd of folks who clearly were into very traditional forms of folk music. I needn't have worried. We had a good crowd at our little stage, which included a bunch of people who already knew my music and in some cases had organized shows for me in the past, but didn't know I was going to be at the festival until they got there and saw my name in the program. (The gig at Ild i Gilden was filmed by three cameras very professionally, but the folks who did that have been busy filming acts at the Roskilde festival since then, so we haven't seen any of their footage yet.)

After the festival we had one more gig in Copenhagen, in front of the anarchist book store that is for now still located on Halmtorvet, in a busy, central section of the city, next to Copenhagen's St Pauli bar. A small but quality crowd of radicals of all ages were there for this outdoor gig, on an evening cold enough that my Australian singing partner had to wrap herself in every layer of clothing that she brought with her (which did not include a winter jacket, which she would have been wearing if she had brought one). The folks at the book store had also been contacted by my trolls (the ones who identify as anarchists), as has become the tradition every time I play there in recent years.

Going from Copenhagen to London is a real exercise in contrast. As we flew from one city to the other, picked up our very expensive rental car at Heathrow, and started the very slow drive into the city, to our lodging in Kentish Town, the difference was stark and immediate. Copenhagen smells good, while London smells like toxic things that are burning. In Copenhagen traffic moves smoothly and everything is orderly. In London, the drivers are mostly very aggressive, and if they're not they get beeped at mercilessly by the drivers behind them. For their part, the pedestrians are mostly suicidal, leaping into traffic with their children at any given opportunity.

During those first couple days in London I took a walk with my friend Jane, who knows all the cool walks in London. If you know the town like she does, it's full of green spaces and narrow streets with very little traffic. If you don't know the city like she does, it's very easy to end up mostly walking on big, stinky streets. This time Jane took me to the Highgate Cemetery, where, among other people, Karl Marx is buried. It's easily one of the most beautiful cemeteries I've ever seen. 

Standing near Marx's grave we saw a new little group of people from a different part of the world respectfully approaching it to pay a visit to Karl, before moving on. Jane was the only one while we were there who brought flowers, one for Karl, and the rest for a friend nearby, which she placed on the grave in traditional Persian fashion. She also cleared old, dead flowers from Marx's gravesite, and generally neatened it up, nicely displaying the flowers that still had life in them, as well as the flyer for the Marxism Festival that someone had placed there, which had not yet been rained on and was still in good shape. Jane is a committed anarchist, and I found the idea that Marx's grave is kept looking nice by, among others, an anarchist volunteer, touching.

Our first gig in London was at the Islington Folk Club, where I've been playing most years for around two decades. It was in a precarious state for some time, but now it seems to have found a new, stable venue, a very nice room in a big chain pub which seems to be happy to have them there every Thursday evening. Ours was the first show at the new location that sold out, with a capacity crowd of 75. It's always one of the easiest shows to sell out, because at least half the crowd consists of club members who play music before each of the sets of the featured act, in traditional British folk club style.

We were then off to the south coast, to Eastbourne, where the annual Engels in Eastbourne conference was happening. We were intent on catching some of the lectures, at least the keynote. We left London sometime in the morning. I thought if we made good time we'd be there by early afternoon. This was not to be, however. We basically had all the usual factors working against us. It was a Friday, and people are often fleeing the city in every direction on a Friday. The train drivers were on strike that day, as they often have been throughout our time in England, so anyone who was getting out of the city was likely doing it in a private car, like we were. We got to Eastbourne just in time to get some dinner before we had to go set up for the gig.

This would turn out to be one of a couple of events where organizers had a conference throughout the day with a concert scheduled in to begin very soon after the last conference talk, but with no room squeezed in there for people to have dinner in between. What tends to happen, I've found, after a long day's conferencing, is people don't feel like going to a concert in the evening, they're too tired, even if there's time for dinner in between the end of the conference and the beginning of the concert. But if there's no dinner plan worked in, most people will go have dinner and skip the concert. The few conference-goers who attended our concert, including the keynote speaker who had just finished her speech that we missed, were a high-quality bunch, to be sure.

One of them was my friend Leah, who we were staying with, who was one of the many Jewish supporters of Jeremy Corbyn to be purged from the ranks of the British Labor Party, in the course of the efforts by groups with misleading names like "Labor Against Antisemitism," intent on ridding the the Labor Party of anyone opposed to Israeli apartheid, and reclaiming the Labor Party from the Corbynistas, putting it back into the hands of the Blairite apologists for empire and apartheid.

After spending a couple hours exploring the lanes of Brighton we were at Coombes Farm, participating in Attila the Stockbroker's Glastonwick festival. True to form for a festival, it was dusty on the farm, and because more cars than usual were coming in and out of the place, and it was windy, the dust was blowing all over the place.

We got there just in time to hear Attila's set with his band, Barnstormer, doing songs from their 1649 album. Brilliant medieval punk rock, especially if you listen to the album, where you can hear the words. We also caught the young Isaac Hughes-Dennis do a brilliant set. He's only twenty now, and was somewhere in his teens when we met. He's already written some of the classics of our times, such as "Cough On A Tory." A rare songwriter of political material who can keep an audience laughing throughout his set. A radical who is funny enough to keep the liberals entertained, even while they're wincing. He grew up in the beautiful town of Hebden Bridge, which I've always loved, but didn't realize how much of it was squatted by travelers of all sorts, until talking with Isaac.

On a free night in London we went with Jane to catch a set of the brilliant Archie Shuttler, formerly of the Commie Faggots, who is featuring a new body of work with a new band, which includes another friend and long-time colleague of Jane's in organizing all kinds of good things in the area, including musical events. Jane took me on a walk along the Thames nearby, where I learned about the family background of the folks who used to run the sugar processing plant that is now the Tate Museum.

I saw many old friends and many new faces in Birmingham next, where we did a show that was a fundraiser for Palestine Action. Many of the folks there were also some of the finest sledgehammer-wielding actionists, as they call themselves, you'll find anywhere. The big news at that time was after three years of acquittals or hung juries, the crown had won a couple of cases, and a couple of folks were doing prison time. 

Next we were back in London for another show, this time in a different part of town than the Islington Folk Club, and mostly for a different audience, though similarly multigenerational, and packed into the room, a smaller room than in Islington, but jammed to the rafters with people.  Folks from the London Action Resource Center had been contacted by my trolls, and as a result at least one member of the collective apparently boycotted the gig.  If he hadn't shown up at the end of it and mentioned this to someone at the door, no one would have known -- there was hardly room for him anyway.

On the bill with me were my old friend and touring partner Robb Johnson, who continues to write some of the best songs about politics and history that you'll ever hear, whether written by someone living or dead.  Along with Robb was a songwriter I hadn't heard before, but who I believe I met when she was still a kid.  Now she's all grown up and singing punk rock songs, occasionally in the Welsh language, which I believe she grew up speaking along with English there in Wales.

The stage name of this dynamic performer is Efa Supertramp, and she has yet another story of cancellation, though this one has a mostly happy ending.

To set the scene, the Glastonbury Festival is one of the biggest festivals in Europe, with something like a hundred thousand participants, near the village of Glastonbury, in southwestern England.  

One thing you need to know is that although it's a huge festival, anyone who has been there and looked around realizes that although most people may be there to hear well-known bands perform on one of the three big huge stages, along with those stages there are dozens of other little ones, where a few dozen or a couple hundred folks might squeeze into a big tent.

Another important fact here is that the organizers of this very popular festival got decidedly political, not for the first time, when they invited the immensely popular leftwing Labor Party leader at the time, Jeremy Corbyn, to speak to a rapturous live audience of 100,000 or so back when he was hopefully going to have some kind of shot of being the next British prime minister.  This invitation really upset the Tories as well as the Labor Party aristocracy, which was even more anti-Corbyn than the Tories were.

After this Jeremy Corbyn speaks at Glasto episode, the tabloid press and other Corbyn-haters have made a habit of trawling the list of hundreds of people performing each time at the festival to see if they can find anyone objectionable that they can very publicly complain about.  In Efa Supertramp's punk rock band, Killdren, they found their enemy.  They had recently put out a very rudimentary music video to their new song, "Kill the Tories Before They Kill You."  Of course, what for one person may be satire is for another advocating terrorism, and the attention the tabloid press generated resulted in the management of the Glastonbury festival disinviting Killdren from performing on the little stage where they were booked to perform.

The sort of happy ending is that as a result of all the tabloid press attention, Killdren got a bunch of gigs and a lot more listeners on Spotify.

The next day we drove up to Leicester with another old friend, photojournalist Guy Smallman, who was also the organizer of the gig at LARC (and is thus the one who has to explain to the rest of the LARC collective why they shouldn't be ashamed to associate with me, regardless of what the trolls say).  We sang outside the gates of the factory that makes weaponry for the Israeli military to a dedicated bunch of people who are keeping a constant vigil outside the factory gates, until it is shut down, or so they say!  Note to anyone planning to sing outside the gates of a factory that is producing weapons for the Israeli military in England who is hoping for an audience:  don't schedule your visit to happen at the same time as Friday Prayers.  Oops.  Not the first time I've done something like that.

Jeremy Corbyn was one of the last speakers at the conference that took place the next day, on Saturday, June 10th, at the Rich Mix center.  Somehow or other we didn't get there until his speech was almost over.

Led by a conference volunteer through Corbyn's audience to the green room I felt like a real celebrity, carrying a guitar as I was, with folks I had met in different parts of the country saying hello as we passed by.  Most of them were apologizing to me that they couldn't stay for the concert because they had to catch a train to some far-away city, where they came from.

There were other really powerful performers at the benefit for striking workers there that evening, among them playwright Tayo Aluko, associated by many with the singer/actor/athlete/linguist/intellectual Paul Robeson, about whom he wrote a one-man musical.  But it was pretty clear that most of the relatively select audience that came for the evening event were fans of the great Lowkey, who delivered his songs along with some great rants.  His recordings are amazing, including lots of videos on YouTube, but live it was hard to hear the lyrics, with the backing track turned up as high as it was.  I wondered if he knew it sounded like that in the mains or not, but I didn't think to ask him until now...

We'd then leave the southern half of England for a while, and go north, first to Wakefield, home of the Red Shed, where we had a fine audience for an acoustic show, and Isaac Hughes-Dennis coming in from his current home town of Leeds to do an opening set.  He brought with him two young women, at least one of whom was also at some point a Hebden Bridge squatter.  Both of them were walking works of art, tattooed in all kinds of cool places.  

Someone else came to the gig at the Red Shed who had first been introduced to my music when he was traveling around in southeast Asia, and went into a socialism-themed pub in the Vietnamese city of Danang.

Before we left Wakefield, we met my old friend Richard Burgon for breakfast.  Over two decades ago he organized so many of my best gigs in England, in Leeds, nearby.  For years now he's been a member of the British parliament representing Leeds.  Somehow, despite his politics, he has managed to avoid getting expelled from the Labor Party.  I've avoided taking any selfies with him just in case, though.  Plausible deniability.

Next stop was Penrith, and one afternoon and evening free to go hiking in the Lake District with Jane and Tony, who have together hiked every one of the 141 peaks in the area.  We hiked for almost five hours, covered a lot of ground, and saw a lot of intensely beautiful vistas, and very cute sheep.  The two of us in their seventies easily outdid those of us in our fifties throughout the hike, making me once again fantasize about moving to Penrith myself and spending a few years hiking those 141 peaks. 

In Middlesbrough, if anyone is wondering how this somewhat uneventful post-industrial town ended up with one of the most active, well-organized, and decidedly leftwing folk clubs in the country, I've either just learned or just been reminded that the folk club at the Little Theater there began because Brighton's football team was going to play against Middlesbrough, there in Middlesbrough.  Leigh and Alex knew that Attila the Stockbroker liked to do gigs when he was following Brighton around, so they offered to organize one.  They just kept on organizing gigs for other artists after that, and never stopped.  This was apparently my seventh appearance at the club, and it was packed, despite the show being on a Tuesday evening.  The opening duo, the Richmond Hillbillies, did a fabulous Americana set.

On the way to Scotland a brief stop in the stunning old university town of Durham, and a visit with an old friend that I used to know when she lived in a squat in Manhattan, and before that when we were housemates in Berkeley, California.  Her New York accent hasn't changed a bit, but life in small-town England has definitely caused her to mellow out just a little, unless that's the influence of aging.

Oddly enough, in some towns even when we could find a place with some vegan options, they didn't always involve anything green.  In Edinburgh we ate at one of the best vegetarian restaurants any of us meeting there had ever been to.  Lorna McKinnon joined us, along with a couple of Scottish friends of Kamala's, who used to live in Australia.  Lorna was in town for an SWP branch meeting, and was able to join us and sing with us at that evening's gig, which involved a cavernous basement venue jam-packed with mostly young women, a bunch of whom were coming from a Girls Rock School.  One of their teachers was on the bill with us, Elsie MacDonald.  She's barely out of her teens, if she even is, but she's already a spell-binding performer, and bound for greatness, I suspect. 

In between our two gigs in Scotland, a very intensive few days of doing shows in Ireland.  We took the ferry from Cairnryan to Belfast, with our car on it, and headed towards Simon Rochford's place near Drogheda.  It was really surreal to be in Ireland, driving in the same car that we had just been driving in Britain.  I've done it before, so I don't know why it was so surreal, except that most of the time when I've gone to Ireland, it's involved a flight from London or Glasgow or somewhere.

Simon took the initiative to organize a little tour for us with gigs for both adults and children.  It was so cool for someone to take the initiative to organize children's gigs.  After having so few people do it, I usually forget to even mention to potential gig organizers that I also do shows for kids.  This time I did mention it, and the gigs for kids were some of the best ones on the visit to Ireland, especially the one at the Irish Institute for Music and Song, a place with a name so cool that it's worth playing in just to say you did.

True to form, in Belfast there was an armored police car parked just down the little street from the venue we were to play at, after we had done the gig for kids, but before we did the one for adults.

Earlier, the manager of the venue had approached me with clear trepidation.

"I hear you have a song called 'Up the Provos'?"

"Yes," I replied, "but I only do it in West Belfast."

Not quite true, but I knew it was what he wanted to hear.  He was visibly relieved.  I knew they had gotten comments on Facebook from local Loyalists criticizing them for having me play in their venue.

Although a bit comical, this scene prior to the gig in central Belfast really seemed to be representative of the kind of attitude Simon was running into when trying to organize and promote the gigs in Ireland, which all had crowds much smaller than Simon had been hoping for, except for that one children's gig.  In another time and place -- or in the same place at a different time -- if he had told various groups that are related to songs I've written that I'm doing a show in town, many of them would have included this information in their next group calendar, or shared a post on Facebook.  Nowadays, the response is likely to be suspicion.  People want to know more about someone before they associate themselves with them by sharing a post about an upcoming concert.  Perhaps they'll be tainted by this association, and thus accused of a transgression.

From what I was hearing on this visit to Ireland, specifically within the Republic of Ireland, the press has been actively trying to turn reality upside-down, accusing people who would traditionally be considered on the Irish nationalist left to be racists and xenophobes for one reason or another.  The society seems to be as confused as the US generally is these days, for the same sorts of reasons.  Whether the people sowing division within Irish society are mostly Irish actors, or if this is basically just a knock-on effect of being a small, English-speaking nation in an internet dominated by Americans, I have no idea.

We had a rejuvenating couple of days in the great city of Glasgow and a wee house concert at the Red and Black Reading Room.  While we were there, news broke throughout the British press that the Glastonbury Festival management had bowed to pressure from critics, and canceled a showing that was to take place there of a new documentary about the campaign of dirty tricks against Jeremy Corbyn.  The critics of the documentary baselessly claim it's antisemitic.  

I'll just note here that I haven't personally seen this documentary -- it's not available on streaming platforms.  As with many new films, it's only available in theaters where it's showing, for now.  But from all the serious reviews of the film I've read and from the people I've talked to who have seen it, there is no antisemitic content, only content that exposes the nefarious activities of groups like Labor Against Antisemitism, the group that led the charge against Jeremy Corbyn when he was running for prime minister.

It was a day before we were to be going to Glastonbury when we were reading about this cancellation.  Talking to various people, from what I could gather, the festival bowed to pressure mounted against it in a flood of traffic online from people complaining about the antisemitic nature of the documentary.  As has generally been the case when my trolls send lots of messages to gig organizers and other artists I'm on the bill with, these trolls also seem to have waited til the last minute to flood Glastonbury organizers with their vitriol.

Evidently jubilant from the success of getting this documentary screening canceled, at least one person from Labor Against Antisemitism, a journalist for a pro-apartheid rag called the Jewish Chronicle, got some traction for a tweet condemning the Glastonbury Festival for having me on the bill on any of their stages.  The evidence he had for the notion that Glastonbury was booking a "collaborator" with antisemites and Holocaust-deniers was sourced from another tweet linking to one of the many bizarre, intellectually contorted attacks on me from the anarcho-puritan end of the left, the same ones more recently attacking Medea Benjamin's book talks.

As this was all happening on Twitter and in the real world, we headed towards Glastonbury.  It's a seven-hour drive from Glasgow to Glastonbury, but I understood that the main thing was to get there before 10 pm.  I couldn't remember why, but I knew we needed to get to the Red Gate by 10 pm.  

This was definitely an occasion where having an attention to detail would have been very advantageous for me.  Being an ADHD space cadet sort instead, I could never keep up with the volume of correspondence that was involved with playing at the Left Field stage in Glastonbury.  In past years playing at this festival I had either played on very small stages where no paperwork was involved, or I was playing on a somewhat bigger stage with Attila, and he was dealing with all the logistics.

I have friends who live on a piece of land that borders the Glastonbury Festival.  Which, given that this is also the case in Roskilde, seems slightly bizarre.  But anyway, it's true.  So I was hoping to stay with Theo and Shannon, but had no idea if I'd be able to get to their place, as it's within the zone of the festival where you have to have the right passes to go anywhere.  When we finally got to the area, Theo and I kept missing each other's calls, and I decided I'd go to the Red Gate before 10 pm and pick up those passes as I had been told.

We got to the Red Gate and did that, which involved driving for an hour or so around this massive festival site it seemed.  Then off to the Orange Gate, and we found a parking spot.  

Now if I had been paying attention to the details, if I had thoroughly read the sheet of paper that came with our tickets, I might have seen the part about how as long as we arrive before 10 pm we could call a shuttle, which would come ferry us and our stuff to the Left Field stage, where we were to play, and where we could find a nice camping space, along with a hot shower.

But I didn't see that part, and didn't figure out what was the deal with 10 pm.  So we walked from the Orange lot to the festival, which took around two hours.  All around us there were people looking like they were going to keel over due to a combination of the heat, and carrying way too much stuff.  People were breaking all the rules of good backpacking, carrying way too much stuff, but in a situation where they really had to hike for miles to get from their parking space to where they might be camping, and then after that, many miles more throughout the festival, hopefully without a large pack on, to hear different acts at different stages, which can be very far apart from each other as well.

We weren't carrying anything.  We left all that in the car.  We weren't going to walk for miles with all that stuff.  Kamala wasn't feeling so hot, and didn't want to walk for hours even without lots of stuff to carry, but she didn't have much choice in that matter, since we didn't read that piece of paper.  Turns out artists get treated so nicely at the festival, and can get a shuttle to pick them up from a parking area and take them places, but that only applies to the ones who read the piece of paper.

After walking for hours and finally finding the Left Field stage, we were ready to abandon the festival and go to London.  But then, like a beautiful mirage, like a veritable oasis in the desert, there in an adorable little hat was Theo.  I hadn't seen him in many years, but he was as fit, as dapper, and as witty as ever.  As we walked for at least another hour to get from Left Field to his encampment on the other, quieter side of the festival, we began to get caught up on things.

What was immediately obvious was we had both been having all kinds of issues with the trolls, in the various forms they take, depending on which of the polarizing issues of the day we seem to be on the wrong side of that time.

What was also clear was the last time Theo had been traveling around the part of the world I'm from, the global justice movement was in full swing, and there was excitement in every direction, and highly engaged organizers everywhere as well.  Our memories of different places are always connected with what the times were like that we associate those places with, and Theo has a very positive association with the US, from his last, long-ago travels there, which included the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, and the IMF/World Bank protests a few months later as well, which may or may not have been where I first met them.

With our car so far away in the Orange Lot and Kamala exhausted, I'm not sure by exactly what kind of miracle we ended up soon enough in the very comfortable surroundings of Theo and Shannon's home, in a gorgeous patch of forest so close but so far from the thumping festival a little way's through the woods from there.  The next day when we took the car to the Orange Lot we knew about the shuttle, and a nice lad came and fetched us in time for us to do our set with Billy Bragg and friends.

We stuck around to chill with folks and catch a couple more bands.  We couldn't understand any of the words.  There were other acts at the festival I would have liked to catch, and the idea of just hanging out in the artist and staff camping area zoned only for Left Field also seemed like a really fun idea, but we were burnt out after the previous day's misadventures and overwhelmed by the tremendous size of the festival, which is really like an actual tent city, a city of 100,000 tents, with loud music to be heard nearby all night long every night.

Our main excuse for abandoning this festival that other people spend hundreds of pounds to attend, if they're lucky enough to get a ticket, was the speakout in Parliament Square in London the next day, in support of Julian Assange.

After a brief visit to look at Stonehenge from a distance, next to a very busy A road, on the other side of a barbed-wire fence, we meandered our way through the busy streets of London, back in the Big Stink.  The next morning, June 24th, the day of the speakout, we got a ride to Parliament Square.

There were literally five different protests happening in different parts of the big green square called Parliament Square, which is dotted with impressive statues of various folks, including Winston Churchill, Mandela, and Gandhi.  Going to a protest where your group numbers in the hundreds, but only takes up a small section of a large space which is populated by four other protests, one of which is bigger than yours (Extinction Rebellion), is a bit of a drag.  

London is a big city, but mostly we just don't have enough supporters, considering what Julian Assange is being accused of, and how important he and his case are for the future of the freedom of the press globally, among other things.  

An Italian artist is traveling with a sculpture which doubles as a brilliant vehicle for hosting speakouts for Assange, consisting of three statues -- ostensibly of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden -- all of them standing on chairs, plus an empty chair to the right of Snowden for you to stand on.  Most of the speeches took place on this chair.  For my part, I had to fuss around with microphones for a couple minutes and not stand on that chair to sing "Behind These Prison Walls." 

As we leave Europe and go our respective, opposite directions home, it occurs to me to come up with some kind of summary of this endeavor that I've just been writing about for the past several thousand words.  In that effort, I'd say this:  we burned a lot of gasoline, we left a lot of people saying they felt a lot more optimistic and energized at the end of the show than they did before it, we introduced quite a few people to things they hadn't heard about, like the fact that two of Elbit Systems factories had closed down, or that an Australian journalist named Julian Assange is being held in a maximum-security prison in London right now.  We got closely followed by trolls from both the pro-apartheid right and the pro-apartheid "anarchists."  And at the end of the tour, as at the beginning, Julian is still in prison, and the Israeli settlers are carrying out pogroms.