Larmer Tree Festival vs "Real Life"

Unfortunately we missed the Big Lunch, as we were at the very lovely Larmer Tree festival in Wiltshire, which, although not available to everyone, due to limited numbers and relatively high prices, in its own way similarly fosters a genuine sense of community. Of course this is not unique to this particular festival; others have a similar spirit of togetherness. However, there is something especially endearing and rewarding about Larmer Tree, the beautiful surroundings helping to create a general mood of fun and happiness that is something akin to a large village fête, and that is why we love it.

Children and adults busy themselves in arts and crafts workshops to create adornable art that is hung in the woods and around the site. Each morning, the campsite wakes up together, people popping their heads out of their tents, saying "good morning" and chatting to each other as they queue for the toilet or wait for the kettle to boil. Little things, certainly, but they bring us together in a way that just doesn't happen when you wake up in your own home, jump in the car, and go off to work all day. Here, people sing and dance together and let themselves go in a way that has largely escaped us in our individualistic society. And it is this that struck us as symbolising exactly what the Transition movement is about.

For a few days, a lot of the everyday social rules go out of the window. There is not the pressure to conform that we normally feel duty bound by. If a man wants to spend the day wearing a dress, or a woman wants to dress like a fairy all weekend, that's fine.

Yes, a festival like this is something of a luxury, and it is in many ways an unrealistic dream to expect that life could be like this every day. After all, for all the easy living and hedonistic fun that we experience, there are others clearing up the mess, cooking the food, organising everything, and it is all paid for with quite substantial amounts of money to allow us to be happy-go-lucky bon viveurs for a few days.

A festival like this is a holiday, and holidays are an escape from reality, but they also offer a glimpse into the past, before we all had TVs in our homes, when we lived together in communities, not just individually in our own little boxes.

Of course, all this is not offering anything practical in terms of how we can begin to get back to this more fulfilling life. Like most other people in our society, we sat down tonight in our own little box and watched TV. "Real life" takes over, and the practical issues of everyday living once more overwhelm you - work, kids, vacuuming, loading the dishwasher, cleaning the car.

These things creep back into your life all too quickly after the freedom of a beautiful escape from it all, but we will carry a little bit of Larmer Tree with us over the coming weeks and months, and try in little ways to make our own lives a little more like that all-too-brief little world that we enter each July and miss so much when we have to leave.

Our favourite time of the whole year is those few days when we have the most basic of possessions, and do the simplest of things, and yet we come back home and are immediately swamped with stuff.

We have resolved this year to try to reduce the clutter in our lives, to have less "stuff". Planning "non-TV" weeks, going for more walks, and generally simplifying our lives where possible, will hopefully help us regain the spirit of freedom that we have largely lost for most of the year.

Events like the Big Lunch, or community-minded festivals like Larmer Tree, might not in themselves help to directly tackle climate change or make our society function more sustainably, but they do offer us a glimpse of a more rewarding past, and we can all take a piece of that with us and begin to mould it into our future. Because living just a handful of days each year out of 365,
in a fulfilling, satisfying way simply isn't enough.