In Cumbria with a bunch of boneheads 08/10/05
It promised to be terrific fun. Instead, I found myself howling obscenities on top of a Cumbrian fell in the middle of the night. I’d been invited to spend a weekend at the Coniston Water Festival, a revival of an ancient celebration in this dramatically gorgeous corner of the Lake District. It proved to be a bizarrely footling exercise paid for out of the public purse. My view of the event may have been tainted by the fact that I was damn near killed off by the organisers, an outfit called Grizedale Arts that was described by its deputy director as “a cutting-edge r&d facility for the arts”. God knows what this drivel means, but I have come to the conclusion that there is an echoing gulf between the specious language of Grizedale Arts and the piffling reality.
After a six-hour journey from London to the festival, just one art event took place during my time there. This was a “Boat Dressing” competition, in which five Coniston Water rowing boats were decked out in various ways. One boat, festooned in black ribbons, was being bailed out by the director of Grizedale Arts, who managed to puff on a fag despite wearing a full-head mask made of tree burrs. The winner was a boat carrying a wind-up gramophone and towing a tiny floating castle. Apparently, it was a tribute to the Werner Herzog film Fitzcarraldo.
Viewing this soggy parade were two dozen mystified locals and Ken Russell. The film director was taking part in an event on the following afternoon, after I was due to depart. He was going to impersonate a cave-dwelling local called Millican Dalton (1867-1947) in a parade and seminar about the Kibbo Kift, a long-defunct quasi-Fascist scouting organisation. “I lived near Dalton’s cave for 15 years. Then I got divorced,” the auteur explained. “Dalton encouraged office workers to enter dangerous situations and climb impossible heights.”
We were, I learned, due to see more of Mr Russell later that night. He was going to be present at a party in Grizedale Arts’ grandly-titled “Centre for Imagined Studies”, located in an isolated house called Low Parkamoor, The organisation’s PR person, who had accompanied me from London, explained we could either take a steep 20-minute walk to the house or I could be driven. Since I was dressed in my London clothes and have an antipathy to climbing Lakeland fells at night, I expressed a preference for the latter. After a hefty pub dinner, the PR person collected me in her hire car and we followed a mini-bus driven by the deputy director of Grizedale Arts, who was taking a party of young artists to the house. We drove round Coniston Water and parked in a murky spot.
After walking for 10 minutes in the pitch black (a few torches were provided) along a forest track, it became evident that the house was not as near as I’d hoped. The path became extremely steep. I crossed a stream in my new shoes. As the climb went on and on, I asked the deputy director what the hell was going on? “Sorry, there’s been a breakdown in communications,” he said. “We’re walking up there.” Having passed the point of no return, there was no alternative but to press on. I felt to be in the hands of a mad Millican Nesbit. Twenty years older than everyone else doing the climb, I was soon gasping for breath. I thought of Robin Cook. Towards the end of this insane trek – which took 45 minutes rather than 20 – I fell in a stream.
Later, I discovered that we had ascended through 18 contours on the OS Explorer Map: a 180-metre climb. One of the five streams we trudged through was large enough to be marked on the map. When we finally reached Low Parkamoor, the deputy director revealed that Ken Russell had already left. (He had been driven up and down in a 4×4.) After entering the “Centre for Imagined Studies”, I could why his stay was so brief. Lacking electricity, it was a dark, dank, derelict dump. When the deputy director said we would have to walk down again, I expressed my feelings forcibly. One of the artists lodged in this decaying squat kindly gave me a lift back to Coniston in his 4×4. “I wouldn’t recommend walking here in the dark,” he said.
In its literature, Grizedale Arts says that the Coniston Water Festival is “the central event for our 2005 programme”. Along with the Kibbo Kift parade, the boat dressing and the “Centre for Imagined Futures”, the festival comprised a version of “It’s a Knock-Out” and a performance on a slate xylophone. Last year, the arty boneheads of Grisedale received £98,592 from the Arts Council and more from local authorities. The Grisedale Arts web-site boasts that its director (the man in the burr mask) “has recently been researching in Japan”. I doubt if he walked there.
“Towards the end of this insane Lakeland trek I fell in a stream.”