Glastonbury! What a wealth of – mostly strange – associations that name conjures up! The little town in the West of England has a cultural significance out of all proportion to its size or political weight. Had it not been for the onset of the coronavirus, the 50th Glastonbury Festival would have been held this coming June.
The Golden Jubilee of an event that usually transforms the Somerset countryside into an English Woodstock would no doubt have highlighted what a lot of orthodox folk dislike about the place – its hippy-dippy, New Age atmosphere. But there is a good deal more to Glastonbury than there is to such American New Age centres as California’s Mount Shasta, with its tales of Lemurians and Ascended Masters, or Arizona’s fabled vortices at Sedona.