The Chalice Well

Vesica piscis cover at the well head

Glastonbury never fails to show a different face on every visit. At breakfast in the George and Pilgrim I suddenly remembered mid veggie sausage that I hadn’t paid the car park fee, due at 9:00. It was now 9:40. Ann went out with my purse and sure enough the warden was standing before the car writing down my number. Ann worked her magic and the warden even advised which machine to use as the nearest was broken! If I’d gone out I know I would have annoyed him and the ticket would have been enforced vigorously.

Yesterday we made our pilgrimage to the Chalice Well. Normally a place of quiet sanctuary and reflection and total peace, this time it had an air of busy worldliness. In part, this was because of the August holiday with many extra visitors and children running about splashing in the water, but partly too from a sense of change in the atmosphere. Some tents and marquees were up in the grounds, reflecting some secular use, while at the well head, usually the sanctuary of sanctuaries whose vesica piscis well-cover dates from 1919, some guy was doing a karma routine that included picking off flower heads to pull the petals and lay them in circles round his wooden beads. One white one had seven petals, interlaced with another flower's five pink petals, leaving a gross asymmetry. Someone had also fixed two old sweeping brushes wired to a branch above the well head, whose purpose I could not fathom.

Despite the distractions, there are quite sanctuaries with time for contemplation there. I had bought Ann a ring earlier in the day. Suddenly while sitting in a hidden nook away from the noise, some engraved writing became visible. We hadn’t been able to see it earlier in the shop or the sun.

The Cascade and Pools with Ann 

There too a stange dream was broken. I had dreamt of a mammalian bird giving birth to an egg, with an umbilicus emerging from the vulva to give life to the now external egg. Suddenly as we sat beneath the cascading red waters, Ann said "from here, that does look so like a vulva with its red-coloured slit. Sure enough, emerging from the slit the water flowed down a channel towards the  Vesica Piscis pools with their strange overlapping egg shapes, completely like the dream I had had.

Jerry the barber

We both had our hair done in Glastonbury too, unusually. Ann's included a gentle, relaxing head massage. I had an old-fashioned haircut, a simple short-back and side job with Jerry the barber. The place was decorated with pictures of motorcycles and curvatious blondes, and Jerry was covered in tattoos, and talked about his love of old American cars which he built into gleaming show-stoppers. I mentioned I'd been to Cuba, and it was as though I'd been to Mecca, for his dream was to visit there.