TOTNES TITTERINGS

15TH AUGUST 2010

Ah Totters, Totters, Totters! I am afraid I spent so much time tittering in Darling Totnes that I am only just writing this now, back in the still of Mile Oak. However, I will come back to that in a minute as I have the small matter of Gay Pride to get through first.

Well, to coin a cliché, I was incredibly proud to have been at the Gay Pride Parade. It was fabulous as always. It was a riot of colour, music and political statement. I am afraid I had a tear in my eye on a regular basis as I felt so moved by what had been achieved in tolerance over even the last twenty years. The RAF felt able to have their first float this year and what a huge step forward that is. The dogs in the crowd were just as well dressed as their owners and were a vision in pearl necklaces, fairy wings and tutus. Yet, what I think is great about it is that it is a family day out. People were there with their children, all enjoying the fairground rides, the music and the atmosphere. There were thousands of people filling Preston Park and it was wonderful that in one place you could see such smiling, tolerance and love as nobody had any judgement about anyone else. Straight, gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transsexual, transvestite or hermaphrodite it genuinely didn’t matter. Still I think the thing that moved me the most about the whole event was the group of teenage boys I saw. These 13/14 year olds were obviously straight, but a couple of their friends were just as obviously gay and it was of supreme indifference to them. They were all just friends together having a fun day out. Now how many places in the world can you see a young teenage boy being totally accepted for being gay without being bullied? Sadly the answer is very few indeed. Stonewall are running a campaign at the moment which has been written by schoolchildren and it very baldly states: ‘some people are gay, get over it!’ which just about says it all really. 

On Sunday I was at my nephew’s 10th birthday party. It was quite strange as most of my family (from great aunt down to nephew, taking in various aunties, uncles, cousins and old family friends on the way) were there. I am seen as the anomaly in the family – nobody knows quite where to place me, or even what I really am as I don’t fall into any convenient box, aside from the one marked ‘nutter’. You can see that some of them have panic in their eyes as they do not know quite what to say to me and I, to be frank, have even less idea what to say to them, so end up rambling incoherently, thus proving their point. Yet, there are many there it was great to see and with whom to catch up. On his birthday, slightly earlier in the week, Aidan had been showing me his presents and I found myself unsure whether I was in Southwick in 2010 or in a Surrealist gathering in 1920s Paris. I know I am out of the real world but quite honestly I think mine is more rational – and that is really worrying! My mum had given him ‘Dragon Quest 9’ for the DS and after he had explained to me what a DS was (with much exasperation and raising of eyebrows as if he couldn’t believe that anyone could be that stupid – fair point!) he started playing it. With complete sang-froid he announced to me that he needed to put on his celestial stockings as the Cruelcumber was coming. I mean, really, I mean! And they say I come out with some new age rubbish, well I aver at this point that the world I live in is nowhere near as bizarre as that. When I asked him on Sunday how his celestial stockings were he replied with a completely straight-face that he had sold them and brought a hairband instead! Still, Dadaist leanings aside, Aidan is a lovely boy and the two of us went out for sushi last night as we both love Japanese food and I had a very entertaining evening with him. 

So, now, back to Gorgeous Totters! Well, I have to say it gave me a great shock. I discovered that there was a part of the UK that I can’t live without. I was staying at the Bay Horse at the top of town. This is run by my friends Kathy and Rob and it is fabulous. It is a listed building and full of atmosphere. As you walk out of the front door and into the Narrows the castle dominates the skyline behind. Strangely, for a military structure, it seems to watch over the town in a benign manner rather than exuding the air of Norman menace that so many castles still have a millennium later. You wind your way down the street passing all the shops that announce their goods are free of parabens, or are home-grown, organic, fair-trade – i.e. non-commercial. These shops are also mostly individual traders; there are very few chain stores in Totnes. There are still two independent record shops – one of which proudly announces in the window that it is a ‘Simon Cowell free zone’. There are butchers, bakers and greengrocers and, a favourite to many Totnesians: ‘The Happy Apple’ which is a general store, but which sells necessary things like Kombucha and carob-covered dried bananas alongside cornflakes and cola. Most important for me, however, is books! Well quelle surprise I hear you sigh. There is obviously the Totnes Bookshop, which is fantastic, but it is the charity shops that make me so excited. Totnes charity shops do not survive on donations of Danielle Steel, Dan Brown and Catherine Cookson. Totnesians seem to have a love of words and a love of recycling which leads to the charity shops being full of (no there is no other word to describe it) literature, as well as easy reading. I have been looking for ‘Bitter Lemons’ by Lawrence Durrell for a while. It was written in the mid 1950s when Durrell was living in Bellapais near Kyrenia in Northern Cyprus and is quite difficult to track down. The first charity shop I walk into in Totnes there it is waiting for me! E.M Forster shares a shelf with Elizabeth George and Khalil Gibran brushes shoulders with Patricia Cornwell – so whatever your predilection there is something for you. 

However, what I love about Totnes the most is the people and hence the conversations I have there. I feel I am constantly learning. There are talks on various topics on almost a nightly basis, depending on your interests; and workshops galore. These workshops also vary from learning practical skills such as woodcraft, through serious talks on quantum physics  or the environment to the more esoteric angel workshops and you find your own level of interest and comfort and, probably most importantly, enjoyment. I used to go to a weekly tarot group when I lived there and they had kindly asked me to attend while I was back in town. The ladies who make up this group are some of the most beautiful people in the world. In some ways it is more of a circle of support than a class. We did our opening meditation together and as I held the hands of Charlotte and Pascale, who were sitting either side of me, I felt immense love and peace such as is very rare in this day and age. Evelyn, who is our teacher and is wise in so many ways that seem to encompass psychology and compassion as much as tarot (which is only one of her many strings anyway), always leads us on such wonderful journeys together and I always leave feeling uplifted. What is important is that these ladies are also very down to earth and practical people who live and work in the so-called ‘real’ world every day – you do not have to be fey to seek for knowledge. 

I was also very pleased to be able to get to a talk given by David (who some of you may know as Og from ‘Og’s Blog’). As always it was full of interesting information with occasional arcane knowledge thrown in as an added bonus. Plus, of course, I was able to meet up with Bob and Barb to do evening gongyo and get some great chanting in. 

I met up socially with the tarot ladies too and indeed not a day went past when I was there that I didn’t get together with at least two or three people from my dark and dingy past –I wish I could talk about each and every meeting as it was so lovely to see everyone and chat about such varying things. I think about how bizarre people thought my conversation was when I first moved to Cyprus but it is so normal to make a comment such as: ‘well it’s not surprising really as his Venus is conjunct Saturn’ in Totnes that you forget that other people don’t speak that way. I have rarely had a conversation about energy and vibration anywhere else on the planet and telling people that their Chakras need realigning can cause complete incomprehension! 

The pub conversation in the Bay Horse late at night is also fantastic. It is a pub that attracts many sorts of people, but rarely the hard-drinking louts, who tend to stick with the Bull over the road. So, it felt so wonderful to be able to be in a conversation where one minute we were being incredibly silly and laughing over something inane and seconds later to be quoting Goethe at each other. My friend Wesley impressed me greatly one night as after 5 pints and at twenty to one in the morning he still managed to use the word ‘recidivist’ in general conversation and completely unselfconsciously. Well done Wes! On Friday night David (Og) a Cornishman born and bred and Bob (local historian and Ghost Walk leader), a Devonian through and through, were having a very friendly competition about whether certain folk stories were Cornish or from Devon and they both burst into song. No one else in the pub batted an eyelid. I can’t imagine that happening in many places. 

The Devon burr is also very comforting. I was sitting at the bus stop when I heard someone mutter into their mobile phone: ‘where’s Geoff to?' and I smiled at the complete gobbledegook of this statement that makes complete sense in this part of the UK. Another lovely thing I had managed to crowbar in was to come back from Dartmouth by river instead of by bus and this meant that I got to see a Grey Seal as we headed upriver past Sharpham. How absolutely wonderful. 

Here is what I suppose gave me the biggest shock. I was homesick for Totnes. This completely amazed me. It is very strange as I had spent my time on Sunday answering people (totally honestly so I thought) that there was nothing I missed about the UK and that I was happy in Cyprus. This is true to a certain extent. I do not miss the landscape – I can see it is beautiful but I feel more at home in the dry and barren sandiness than I do in lush greenness. I do not miss Britain as such at all. What I realised I missed was Totnes itself: the constant learning and vibrant conversation. It is my spiritual home. But what I also realised  was that what I wanted to do was to lift Totnes bodily and put it down in the Mediterranean. I do not need the rest of England that surrounds it at all. I know that without the sunshine of Cyprus; getting to see the sea every day; being free from aches and pain; and the general fun of my life there I would go back to being the walking misery I was before. A number of people came up to me while I was in the town and said ‘are you the lady who moved to Cyprus?’ When I said that I was they told me that they hadn’t been sure as I looked so much happier and healthier than I did before and that my eyes in particular were full of life instead of pain and unhappiness. 

I need both temporal and spiritual stimulation in my life. I need a down to earth life and a life of the mind and the soul. To risk sounding incredibly Totnesian this is the constant battle between my Aries sun and my Scorpio moon. The long and the short of it is I have understood that my life needs to be balanced; I have to find the middle way. I cannot give up Cyprus as a home in winter because I have never been this healthy in my life, but to keep myself sane and to keep up with my constant need for information and growth I need Totnes as a home in the summer because apart from anything else it reminds me every time that no matter what the question is, love is the answer. So, thinking caps on chaps and solutions by return email please! 

I think the answer for me might well lie in this quote from Howard Thurman: ‘Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go and do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.’ I want to be alive  and not merely surviving and for me the recipe is equal amounts of sun, sea, laughter and knowledge and I know the nearer I get to getting the recipe right the more I am able to give back to the world and, despite appearances at many times in my life, I know I have a hell of a lot to give.