Yesterday evening there was a ‘special meeting of Glastonbury Town Council’ to discuss the implications for Glastonbury of plans to develop Hinkley Point C. The meeting was preceded by a front page story in the local paper where the Mayor was calling (rather hopefully) for a new relief road to carry all the extra heavy traffic.

The focus of the meeting was a presentation by two Council Officers from Somerset’s ‘Major Energy Project Group’. This was followed by questions, first from Town Councillors, then from members of the public. This was the first time that people in Glastonbury had been given any chance at all to express their feelings or opinions - though it was firmly restricted to matters of direct consequence to the town of Glastonbury.

The main message of the meeting, whispered in between every line, was how disempowered we, the people, have become in relation to large corporate bodies and projects such as this. In Glastonbury and Wells we have elected an MP [Tessa Munt, Lib Dem] who is opposed to new nuclear power stations in principle – which has made no difference. And that’s as far as democracy goes.

Since the 2008 Planning Act, local councils are no longer the planning authority for projects deemed to be of strategic national importance. There will be no repeat of the interminable planning inquiry that followed the last proposal for a new power station at Hinkley, in the 1980s. The planning authority is the relevant Secretary of State, with recommendations from the Planning Inspectorate (formerly the Infrastructure Planning Commission). 

In other words, central government, which actually made its decision before informing anyone in Somerset, four years ago. The County Council only has powers to negotiate additional measures, in ‘mitigation’ of whatever inconvenience this plan may pose to the people who live in its vicinity.

EDF submitted their application for a ‘Development Consent Order’ to build a 3.2 Gigawatt nuclear power station and related ancillary works on October 31st. It is expected to be approved in about three months time. The application was 90,000 pages long.

The site has already been cleared, and major earthworks are scheduled to begin in March or April 2013. By July, they intend to be bringing in stone aggregate at a steady rate of 10,000 tonnes a day.

The big question in everyone’s minds at last night’s Town Council meeting was what can be done about the rumoured 400 heavy lorries a day that are due to come thundering down Chilkwell Street and Bere Lane if the project goes ahead? And that was the question to which there was no answer.

Quite clearly, it’s already too late to think about building a relief road to the south east of Glastonbury, even if that was a good idea. But the unanswered questions start well before that.

The planning process has not considered, at all, any issues of road use or road improvements to the east of the M5 motorway. It has only looked at road usage between the motorway and Hinkley Point on the coast. EDF have made no statement at all about where they intend to source their aggregate, and are not obliged to do so until they sign a contract with their suppliers. The road strengthening around Glastonbury earlier this year was not financed by them.

Nevertheless, they are looking for five million tonnes – yes, 5,000,000 tonnes – and the Mendip hills are a major source of limestone aggregate. The A361 runs through one side of Glastonbury and it is, however unwisely, designated as the main route from the Frome/Shepton Mallet area west towards the M5.

EDF have officially said nothing about this at all. When they get round to buying aggregate, that will be a private commercial agreement with their suppliers, and how they transport it as far as the M5 will be their business. Options apparently include importing it from ‘super-quarries’ in Norway, dredging it up from the bottom of the sea, or – if it comes overland – transporting it by rail to Bristol, and then down the M5 (though if it came from the Mendips the ageing rail track would need upgrading, which makes this option unlikely).

Nevertheless, even the Somerset County Council officers were prepared to say that it would be “surprising” if the Mendips didn’t provide at least a significant proportion.

EDF are building a gigantic jetty at Hinkley, and plan to bring 80% of their materials in by sea. Except that local people have pointed out that, because of the tidal patterns, it will be unusable a lot of the time and 80% is a very ambitious target.

Not to worry, even if EDF discover that they have to bring in most of their aggregate by road, they are restricted by the planning agreement to an average of 500 HGV journeys a day (that’s 250 vehicles, in and out). On peak days this could rise to 750 (375 each way), but even that doesn’t quite reach the rumoured 400.  And SCC will be monitoring such things carefully, so that if the ‘community impact’ significantly exceeds what has been agreed, then EDF will be in breach of their planning conditions and the construction work will be … well … illegal.

If in the event they find that they have to apply for a variation to their Development Consent Order then the situation is, er, complicated;  in fact it would mean a difficult legal situation involving a new and completely untested major projects planning regime. 

And if this were to happen with a £13 billion construction project going full tilt, with pressure to keep up to schedule and with backing from central government, is work going to suddenly stop whilst they sort out the legal niceties?

Nobody at the meeting really thought it would.

But the reassuring men from Somerset County Council did make clear that as soon as they know who the aggregate suppliers would be,  they will be in touch with them to discuss the implications of their transport plans.

The Unique Publications website is finally up and running. After five months of planning, building, despairing, deliberating, tweaking and testing, here it is.

No, it isn’t finished. It will never be finished; it will endlessly be added to, improved and refined. But is is functional, good enough for now, and live on-line. Welcome.

Thanks are due to Kevin Redpath of Redpath Productions for introducing me to Weebly’s templates and getting me going. Basically, the site has been put together using free build-it-yourself software, and much to my surprise, I have really enjoyed doing it.

One word of warning though, for anyone using Weebly’s free build-it-yourself software, and who also wants to sell things. Weebly’s tie-up with Google Checkout does not support any currencies other than US dollars. If you happen to be based anywhere other than the USA, there’s a problem.

So thanks are also due to Wolf Thandoy, who built the Panet Gong website for Daevid Allen (actually for Jonny Greene, who runs the Gong Appreciation Society from his office down the corridor from Unique Publications). It was Wolf who took on the task of integrating a £ sterling shopping cart, and who managed to help out with several other important issues whilst he was at it.

It was a good two weeks before he gave up on trying to adapt Google Checkout for the job, which just seemed to present one headache after another. Then he advised me to set up a Paypal account and, once that was in place, why not use Mal’s e-commerce? It’s so much simpler.

Once I’d done that, it all fell into place in a few days. As I write I am waiting for the 'DNS propagation' to be complete.

If you’re reading this then you’ve already found the site, so I won’t tell you about what’s on it. I will encourage you to bookmark this page however: the blog will be frequently up-dated with news items, including any major new developments with Unique Publications and the website, but also interesting things from Glastonbury and surrounding area – particularly, for the time being at least, the on-going saga of Hinkley Point and the proposal to build  a vast new nuclear power station on the Somerset coast, next to the existing Hinkley Point A and B.

It’s been wet in Somerset lately. Wet everywhere in the counry, I dare say. And we are used to the Somerset levels filling up with water – they were, after all, reclaimed from the sea in the first place. This weekend there have been an extraordinary number of visitors to Glastonbury Tor – and not particularly to see the Tor, but to get a dramatic view of the surrounding watery countryside.

The local Drainage Boards pride themselves, with their pumps and drains and management techniques, on being able to shift the water around and flood whichever bit they like. Just south of Glastonbury, between the bottom of Wearyall Hill and the River Brue, gets flooded most years. It happens particularly when there’s been a lot of rain in Wales; the Severn Estuary gets so full of water that the Brue and other Somerset rivers can’t drain away, start backing up, and the Drainage Boards’ technical prowess comes into play to keep things under control.

This year, there’s water everywhere. Avalon looks like it might be an island once again, if only temporarily. Low-lying parts of Somerset, as in years gone by, could only be inhabitable in summer.

All this rain puts me in mind of doomsday global warming scenarios, which often suggest that the world will not only be hot, but dried out, a desert. I don’t get it. If it’s going to be hotter, with ice melting and more water evaporating from the oceans, won’t there be more rain? 

I’ve got a book ['The Link'] by Colin Tudge, a writer I really enjoy. He’s good at helping us to think in different ways about things that we may have taken for granted. He points out, rather apologetically (good ecologist that he is), that 45 million years ago – when there were conditions somewhat similar to what we might expect if there was run-away global warming – there was lots of heat, lots of moisture, and lots of carbon: ideal conditions, in fact, for life, which proliferated.

In mid-European latitudes there were deciduous tropical rain forests. All the main ‘genera’ of animals that we know today came into being about then. Life, for primeval apes and suchlike, was fantastic.

Which is an interesting perspective on the subject – and one which no-one else seems to have suggested.

Anyway, up on the Tor this weekend it wasn’t particularly warm – though warmer than usual for the back end of November. My neighbours, who I met going up with their camera just as I was coming down with mine, said they had a cano in their back garden, which might come in useful. They were thinking perhaps they could hire it out to tourists.

Gabrielle Roth died in New York on Monday night.

If you're a 5 Rhythms dancer, you probably already know this. If you're not, then this may mean nothing to you. All the same, I felt the need to mark her passing in my own brief way.

I never met her, though I know several people who did. I love the dance practice that she created.

On Monday evening our local group in Glastonbury knew that - as her family had put it - she was 'moving into stillness'. We danced with her picture on the altar. 

If you are interested to find out more, this is probably the best place: http://movingcenterschool.com/home

Early this year, Somerset County Council sent everyone in our street (I live in Chilkwell Street, Glastonbury) a letter telling us that “essential works” including resurfacing the road were to be carried out, and the street would be closed to through traffic for two to three weeks. 

This seemed strange, since the road had been resurfaced only a few years ago – certainly more recently than the High Street, for instance.

The street was duly closed and contractors moved in to rip up the tarmac. Then the gas and water companies appeared, and it looked like the gas and water mains got covered with a protective layer of concrete before the new surface was put on. This seemed strange too, because up until then no attention had ever been paid to our gas or water mains unless they were actually leaking.

A neighbour suggested that this was all to do with the proposed construction of a massive new nuclear power station on the coast at Hinkley Point, and then it started to make sense. Chilkwell Street, along with Bere Lane and Magdalene Street (which had received the same treatment), together form the route round the edge of Glastonbury that carries traffic from Frome (and from the stone quarries in the Mendip hills) along the A361 and out to the M5. 

This is the route to Hinkley Point, and people started talking seriously about the 400 aggregate lorries a day that are expected down our street if construction goes ahead. That’s a heavy truck every one or two minutes, and presumably the same coming back in the other direction. Hinkley Point C would be the second largest construction site in the whole of Europe, and work would go on for ten years.

The road works were completed, with nice new tarmac – which apparently includes a high rubber content, designed to reduce noise and vibration (though I haven’t noticed the difference regarding the excessive amount of heavy traffic that already passes our front door). Talking to friends, I discovered that similar roadworks had been going on elsewhere in the county, particularly around Bridgewater. It looks serious.

I did wonder who was paying for all this. I get the impression that it’s not the County Council, whose support for the building of Hinkley C is no doubt encouraged by a lot of expensive infrastructure work being provided either by central government or by EDF (Electricité de France), the major player in plans to construct and run the proposed new power station.

Around that time, activists (including personal friends) briefly occupied the empty farmhouse on the farm that has become the potential construction site. They were swiftly removed after EDF took them to court, and this was followed by an EDF poster campaign around Somerset encouraging us to think kindly on the supposed benefits provided by nuclear power. I was certainly sympathetic to the occupation, but I didn’t get involved because I’d made the decision a few years back to give up taking part in adversarial politics, which tends to polarise people, upsetting as many as it inspires, and which requires a great deal of (human) energy input for no certain result at all. 

Now I am reading my local newspaper. They have a whole page about Hinkley Point that tells me some remarkable things - such as that Centrica (British Gas), which has a 20% stake in the project, is thinking of pulling out.

And then that EDF is short of money “following government-enforced spending on reactors in France after the Fukushima atomic disaster”. They are presumably also under pressure from their French bankers, who have had a few problems of their own in recent times.

EDF are consequently looking for new investment partners – notably the Chinese. Various British MPs and energy advisers  are alarmed at the “security risk” posed by the Communist Chinese potentially having access to “the intricate architecture of the UK’s national grid and the processes through which electricity supply is controlled, as well as to the UK’s nuclear technology.”

But besides all this, “communities hosting renewable energy plant” (I think they mean wind farms) “get more compensation than those around nuclear plants,” and this imbalance is particularly marked in the planning agreement between EDF and Somerset councils, which is close to being finalised.

To cap it all, EDF are demanding that once the new reactors are operating they should receive a guaranteed payment more than three times the current market price for electricity, a price equivalent to the notoriously subsidised amount charged by expensive offshore wind farms. If the market price doesn’t rise to meet the guaranteed price, the government would have to make up the difference.

Meanwhile, all this infrastructure work, and indeed preliminary work on site at Hinkley itself, is going ahead without formal planning consent, never mind the promised public enquiry; and, with cost estimates rising, EDF and Centrica are still “to decide [later] this year whether to proceed with construction.”

It seems that our government, if it can’t or won’t invest in sensible renewable energy on a scale that would make it viable, and having committed itself to reducing its reliance on fossil fuels, will be forced to pay out billions to support the nuclear industry.

Maybe the whole mad scheme will fall through; but if not, back home in Chilkwell Street I’m beginning to think that this is an issue worth making a big fuss about. And I suspect there may be lots of people thinking much the same.

I arrived at work this morning to find an email from an old friend, telling me about a funeral that was to take place at 11.30. The funeral was for Christine Chapman, an important member of the ‘New Glastonbury Community’ back in the early 1970s.

I hadn’t know her very well, though I certainly remembered her – she must have made a big impression on me at the time (I was still in my teens, she would have been in her early thirties). I recalled visiting her house in Northload Street once, and for a while I had lived in a caravan, on Godney Moor outside Glastonbury, that had originally been hers. Like my friend in his email, I remembered her ‘with long blonde hair with gentle voice and long skirts and flowing movements like a dancer.’

I decided to go to the funeral. Her family had brought her back to Glastonbury for the funeral and burial, as had been her wish, and anyone here who had known her was invited to join them. On the way to the church I realised that though I remembered her, I couldn’t recall what she actually looked like. As I walked through the door, I was handed a printed ‘order of service’ with her picture on the front, looking exactly as I had known her.

I think it was the picture more than anything, with the Tor in the background, which brought up such a strong feeling for me that she symbolised that early time in Glastonbury. I felt grief; not really for her – though I’d liked her, we hadn’t been close, and I hadn’t seen her for 40 years or so. More for my own lost youth, and for those priceless days that I could now only remember as being endlessly sunny.

Afterwards I spent a little time talking to the others who had known Christine, who had been ‘Flower Power people’ (as we’d been described in the church) all those years ago. Later it struck me that this must be a bit what it’s like for war veterans getting together on Armistice Day – every year there’s a few less than last year, and everyone’s a little bit older.

But mainly, thanks to Christine, and to her family, for inviting us along, to remember.

The other day I went into ‘La Terre’ café for a cup of tea, and found an exhibition of photographs on the wall – photographs of High Street shops from the 1990s. I looked again, and there was my old shop at No 5 High Street.

The pictures had been taken by Chris Render, who sadly died two years ago. (It was his daughter – working as a waitress in the café – who had put the exhibition together as a memorial). He used to run a small ‘new age’ type publishing company, Green Magic. I had no idea that he was also into photography, nor that the picture of my shop existed.

I was very pleased to find it, and here it is - Unique Publications, circa 1995:

Some time ago, Gareth Mills at Speaking Tree books suggested that I write a sequel to Patrick Benham’s book ‘The Avalonians’ - in other words, a history of ‘alternative Glastonbury’ from the 1960s up to the present day.

I re-read Patrick’s book, and decided that the task would be impossible. There have been so many more characters than the twenty or so identified by him in the first half of the 20th century, and so many more interesting events. How could I possibly decide which were the most important, the most worthy of inclusion in what might come to be regarded as the definitive written ‘history’.

Furthermore, most of the protagonists are still alive, many of them still here in Glastonbury – and all with their own opinions as to what went on, why, how, in what order, and what was of significance. I would be entering into a minefield, especially as I have been in Glastonbury for much of this time myself, and those events that I was actually involved in inevitably loom larger, for me, than those that I wasn’t.

However, sorting out a couple of filing-cabinets-full of Glastonbury archive material for the website has given me a new perspective on this. The community’s documentation of itself tells the story – in very piecemeal fashion it is true, but nevertheless it provides a yardstick: that which was recorded at the time is what should be included.

This is by no means a flawless method of dealing with the subject, but it is a workable one; and brings back the possibility that the story of ‘The New Avalonians’ will be written up after all.

I have just spent three months in north east Scotland engaged in a gardening project, creating a vegetable garden on a friend’s land in rural Aberdeenshire. The weather wasn’t so good – possibly not so wet as in England (during this legendary drowned summer) – but colder. Nevertheless I got the job done, and I was very pleased with it. I’ve come back feeling fit, and all the better for a good break from sitting in my office in front of a computer screen.

On very wet days I spent my time sitting by the wood burner, reading. Amongst one or two other things, I re-read the book I had written back in 1985 about the ‘Rainbow Village’ occupation of Molesworth cruise missile base. I decided it was worth reviving, perhaps re-printing in proper paperback format now that short-run printing is available at a reasonable price; but also I noticed a couple of things that were interesting in a different way.

Before arriving at Molesworth I had been working as a gardener, and the first thing I took on when I got there was digging over the ‘peace garden’ which was planned for a derelict patch of ground near the entrance, next to the Molesworth ‘peace chapel’ (which was never finished, but that’s another story). After spending several days digging, I’d earned the name of ‘Bruce the Gardener’.

The tag didn’t last, because I spent most of my time engaged with political work, writing and printing newsletters, going to meetings, and living in the part of the village that became know as ‘Admin Alley’. One day I recorded that I was feeling fed up with all this, that really I would much rather be somewhere where I could spend my time gardening and writing stories.

It struck me, re-reading this in Scotland in 2012, that after 32 years it really was time I did something about it. I stayed only three months, and I didn’t get round to writing any stories – maybe I’ll go back to do that some other time – but I did do plenty of gardening, and I feel like I have been reclaiming that part of myself,  ‘Bruce the Gardener’. So here’s a picture of the garden: