Hooray for Badger, his missus, and the Stonehenge hippies

Submitted by Anonymous on Wednesday, 26 June 2002 Page Views: 3325

In the wee small hours of Friday morning, thousands of hippies, pagans, witches, druids, crusties, new-age weirdos, travellers, itinerants and assorted soap-dodgers mostly blitzed to the gills, gathered at Stonehenge in the rain to celebrate the summer solstice.

By Rod Liddle, Source: The Guardian Wednesday June 26, 2002 The star of the event, the sun, got into the spirit of things by turning up about seven hours late, stumbling and coughing, red of face and bleary-eyed. But nobody minded much, or even noticed, perhaps.

This was a peaceful and agreeably drunken festival, which only recently has been permitted by English Heritage, the quango that "runs" Stonehenge. It insisted, however, that the celebrants cleared the site the next day so that coachloads of tourists could be allowed to gaze at the stones with bovine intensity, before making their inevitable progress to Bath or Salisbury, ("Home of James Hay").

So the revellers did as they were bidden and headed for the stone circle at Avebury. There the statutory body is the National Trust, which wanted everybody away from the place by precisely midday on Saturday.

Nobody, however, wished to leave. One of the main objections to moving on was that they were so utterly and totally drunk that they would constitute an enormous traffic hazard on the A303 - an excellent and, I would have thought, incontestable, defence.

Others wished to remain to attend a wedding, or "hand- fasting", as they preferred to call it. Badger - a cheerful, lank-haired hippy - intended to marry his beloved in a ceremony conducted by some similar creature known as Arthur Pendragon. But nobody was quite sure when it would all happen. A policeman who was asked surveyed the scene with good-natured concern: "Dunno," he replied, "all depends what time they find Arthur Pendragon. He's probably drunk and asleep in a hedge somewhere." But the authorities were immovable. Get out of town or you will be locked up, was their response to the exquisite romance of the moment. And it was just after this - as he stood, awaiting eviction in the Avebury carpark - that Badger came out with his magnificent quote. "Yes, of course we take over the carpark," he raged to a journalist, "but the carpark is for the general public, isn't it? And we ARE the general public... aren't we?" And then he paused, and added: "I mean, we may not smell like the general public - but we are." For this statement alone it is impossible not to hope that the National Trust relented and that Badger and his "missus", as he referred to her, enjoyed a moving and wonderful ceremony up there on Salisbury Plain.

And also, a fervent prayer: Dear Lord; if You are a Guardian reader, as we assume You must be, please bestow Your blessing upon Badger and his wife. That they may enjoy a happy and enduring life together, travelling wherever they like upon the highways and byways of England, irritating the hell out of the pompous, the stuffy, the stuck-up and the deadly sober and all those corporate bodies - the National Trust, English Heritage, the NFU, the Country Landowners Association, local councils, etc - who would wish, out of spite or officiousness, to stop them doing as they please and, instead, contrive to annoy the rest of us by putting up signs saying fatuous things like: "Welcome To Hampshire Where Partnership Works."

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