Woodford. Tuesday, 4.10pm
Humans are a diverse lot.
As I wander the Woodford Folk Festival in a rare comfort (the summer heat mitigated by a cool threat of rain), that diversity is on show. I find it refreshing.
If you want to tattoo the outside of your neck with a picture of the inside of your neck, go for it. I mean, it’s not the sort of thing I’d do, but there’s much I wouldn’t do. Like riding a unicycle dressed only in pink tights with a tail. Or squeeze my body through a tennis racquet by dislocating my shoulders. (Even if I could dislocate my shoulders it would have to be one hell of a big racquet.)
It’s good to be different. It’s healthy. It’s human.
As I watch a man with a badly sunburnt face and shoulders (muscle shirt) check out the hat stall for some much-needed protection, I am aware anyone can make a bad call, that’s human, but the critical ailments of our planet have not been caused by stiltwalkers with shaved heads or steampunkers with goggles or even sunburnt men with melanomic fashion sense; the world’s crises are created by men in suits and ties – men who look like each other despite the genetic and historical variety of their different societies. These men strive for a social and individual uniformity that upsizes profit, downsizes difference and capsizes boats. Uniformity is the hallmark of the new inhuman world, a corporate world, a bankrupt world.
No-one on a unicycle has ever destroyed a river system in a quest for corporate profit.
People in leaky boats are not turned back at the beach by a man in a tutu and Blundstones. And those people in those boats are not seeking refuge because their homes, their towns, their society were blown to bits by a barefoot woman with a feather through her nose and rainbow butterfly wings.
Truly inhuman acts are the products of barely-humans working for unhuman forces. They wear suits and ties. This mean spiritedness, this deviousness, must come from the nature of the suit itself, I reckon. It is not a flowing garment which gracefully accommodates natural human movement. It is a straight jacket which conditions its user to straightness, any deviation into bentness resulting in ugly creases, restricted movement, no job and no girl.
Add a string round your neck, and you belong to the club of conformity, a silly victim of a fake promise.
The sunburnt man chooses a stylish straw hat. But it has a brim which is so small the hat looks like a straw beanie. He pays the stallholder and puts his new hat on. His happy face is still fully exposed to the sun, but he’s happy.
I will never wear a suit and tie. Never. This ugly, constricting, ridiculous attire is the uniform of social misfits who are eating away at the human world of colour and difference. These look-a-likes are murderers and planet destroyers. The suit and tie is how you recognise them.
If, by some chance you’re wearing a suit and tie now, but you are a decent person – take it off. Now. For your own sake.
We are suffocating in the claustrophobia of increasing homogenity. Non-comformity is seen by the Suited Ones as cause for ridicule, discrimination, isolation, detention, turning the boat back and even death. The Suited Ones produce nothing except pollution and platitudes and live high on the exploited hog. People without suits are doing the real work, or are in prison, in debt, in bomb shelters, or here at the festival.
The skeleton of a pterodactyl is nibbling at my feet.
Oh, Woodford. Thanks.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
