Swedish Spirit Camp 4.

I begin to acclimatise and see the many good sides of this experience. Everyone is open hearted and lovely carrying that deeper attractiveness as well as more outward beauty and handsomeness. The organisation is brilliant and spirits are undaunted by the rain and mud. There is a blessed absence of media and its mind bending turgid requirement to regiment to its tunes. It is an oasis quite different from my normal life. As the dancers build and prepare for their ceremony we DS’s put up a few extra tents, toilets and wash stands, and finish off the electrics and plumbing between rounds of the aforementioned poo slinging. In respect I won’t describe the ceremony except to say it lasts three days and nights and we DS’s must keep a fire going the whole time in shifts. Though a large amount of DSing is sitting and waiting it’s strangely tiring. Day by day I feel weariness creeping up on me. At the end of the ceremony there’s a feast and an impromptu show. I put my name down for a turn. It begins with the children and, seeing their beautiful naivety, I ditch my plan for a ‘trying to be clever’ song in favour of enacting a sketch of how we DS’s work together. I depict me, the gormless forgetful private, and Evanmouse, the prone to stress general, that culminates in the inevitable strangulation scene, sort of one-man slapstick Shakespeare. Apparently tears were shed and pants nearly soiled. A triumph. Not being used to playing a 150 strong post- ceremony, post- feast high as a kite audience I took their rapturous applause to mean they wanted more, so I did the song too; a lovely, appropriate James Taylor song. And thus I became the star of the show; mostly because I was so tired I could hardly stand up or keep up any sort of pretence. I had achieved reality through exhaustion. The following day after many plaudits I took to hiding.