A Wet WOMAD

I've been going to WOMAD ever since it began, often to sell programmes, tramping round the campsite, taking the programmes to the happy campers having breakfast, or an evening aperitif. Until one day, two years ago, when the management changed and we all lost our programme selling jobs. But I still go, whatever the weather. But this year I found myself alone at the last minute. Friends were ill, exhausted, stuck at home with people to look after etc.

On Friday Shye Ben Tzur, Israeli composer, performer, poet played with the Rajasthan Express in the Siam tent. He composes instrumental and devotional music in Hebrew, Urdu and Hindi, wonderful fusions of traditional Indian Sufi music, jazz and Rajasthani brass band sounds. I first saw him perform in the Mehrangar fort in Jodhpur, during the sacred music festival last year, with Jonny Greenwood and all sorts of Rajasthani musicians from different musical traditions, all jamming together. For a while I was transported back to the hot, dry Rajasthani desert, away from the wet, muddy English countryside. 

Nomade Orquestra from Brazil played a wonderfully jazzy set in the big red tent on Saturday.Then everyone rushed to the Siam tent as the rain began to fall, where a rapper was entertaining the crowd - not my favourite kind of music, but it was far too wet to go anywhere else. Leaving the tent after the set was not an appetising prospect, so most of us were trapped, waiting for Seu Jorge, who surreally sang David Bowie songs in Portuguese. The audience joined in and sang in English. A very strange set.

Rain stopped just long enough for us to leave the tent and stand in the mud, or dance in the mud to Toots and the Maytals. Half way through his set the rain started again in earnest. People put their umbrellas up and stayed to watch, but I joined the throng of fleeing festival goers as we tramped and skidded through the slippery mud to the car park.

The hawthorn berries are starting to ripen up. Hawthorn, Crataegus monogyna, is used to stimulate the peripheral circulation. 

How did you come to your path?

It was a slow process; a very slow process. It took the best part of half a century. The writing was always there. I wrote voluminous letters to all sorts of people. I kept diaries. I scribbled all sorts of stuff, but it never occurred to me to put it together in the form of a book. Until, that is, I finished my PhD at the grand age of fifty, and began to research the medicinal plants that grew where I had chosen to live, on the borders of Wales in a wild and watery place in the Golden Valley. I began to be aware of the ancient Celtic traditions that permeated every layer of life in these Welsh borderlands. I became interested in the traditional medicinal plants that the ancient Celts were using and I started to collect and grow them, foraging in the countryside around my house for wild berries, leaves, roots and all things useful to an ancient wise woman, someone who might call herself a hedgewitch today, who would just have been the local healer once. I discovered that the plants that were used for medicine were surrounded by myth, mystery and symbolic meaning that was once as important at their physical healing properties.  

Betony, very sacred Celtic plant, grows in old meadows. I have been trying to grow betony, without success. I ordered some seeds and sowed them in my allotment, but nothing happened.
Maybe they will surprise me and sprout up next year.

Betony increases circulation to the brain, thus improving memory. It is a mild tonic and helps the body to heal itself, slowly. Betony is one of those herbs that you should take every day for a long period in order to benefit from its gradual uplifting effects. Take an infusion of the dried herb when you have a headache, feel anxious or depressed. It will gradually improve these symptoms.