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A man is dead at a Christian festival. A sign fell upon the faithful at the Grand Gathering of the Devout at Wiston Park, near Steyning in West Sussex, on Friday afternoon, and a forty-one-year-old gentleman from Eastbourne did not survive it. Six others were injured, four of them taken to hospital with what the authorities describe as serious injuries. The organisers have cancelled the remainder of the event, which was to have run until Sunday. One does not joke about such things. A man went to celebrate his faith and did not come home, and this Author sets down her pen for a moment before continuing.
Dame Mullally, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said she was “sad and shocked,” and offered prayers for the family, the injured, and the festival community. The Crown’s Health and Safety Watchdog is now investigating the circumstances. The Sussex Constabulary attended at approximately a quarter to four on Friday afternoon. There is nothing more to say, except: may the family find comfort, and may the inquiry be swift and thorough.
And then, as if the heavens had read the news and decided to respond in kind, the bank holiday weekend arrived draped in thunderstorms, gales, and what the Meteorological Office cheerfully terms “heavy and thundery showers sweeping across the Southern Kingdom and the Principality.” After weeks of scorching heat and drought – weeks during which England baked, cracked, and gasped – the summer has chosen its final act: not a gentle fade, but a drenched and windy tantrum. The Meteorological Office concedes that parts of north and west North Britain may see very little rain at all, which will no doubt be received with great satisfaction north of the border and great resentment south of it. Parts of the Midlands and northern Southern Kingdom, already sodden from recent downpours, now face the additional indignity of flash flooding. A bank holiday, gentle reader, is the Kingdom’s most optimistic recurring institution – and the sky, year after year, finds this hilarious.
Which brings us to water – or rather, the alarming scarcity of it when not falling sideways from storm clouds onto bank holiday picnics. The Crown Environmental Officers have been quietly warning that by 2055, the Southern Kingdom faces a shortfall of five billion litres of water per day in public supply – enough to fill the Capital’s Grand Stadium four and a half times over, daily. In July, farmers across the lower half of the Southern Kingdom were temporarily forbidden from drawing water from rivers lest the wildlife perish entirely. One fourth-generation Suffolk farmer watched half his crop of peas and wheat wither to nothing. In 1818, the poet Keats complained bitterly that England was “continually under hatches” with rain. One suspects he would revise that complaint today. The irony of a nation currently being lashed by gales and thunderstorms simultaneously running out of water is precisely the sort of contradiction that makes this Author reach for something stronger than tea.
Meanwhile, the War Office has elected to spend six million pounds on powered paragliders for the Royal Marines and the Parachute Regiment – compact, backpack-sized contraptions that can apparently be assembled in eight minutes and launched on foot, flying troops up to two hundred miles behind enemy lines under cover of darkness. The machines are titanium-framed, radar-evasive, and manufactured by a Wiltshire company of eleven souls called Blakcro, founded in 2023. Eleven people. This Author is not suggesting that the defence of the realm ought to rest upon a workforce smaller than a country house shooting party, but she does raise an eyebrow, and she raises it with some energy. Trials are expected to begin “in the coming months.” One trusts the bank holiday weather forecast has been consulted.
Finally, to the summit of the great Welsh mountain of Yr Wyddfa, where the queue-jumping has grown so vigorous that a fifty-eight-year-old lady from Hull, having had both hips replaced and wisely taken the railway carriage to the top, was shoved, jostled, and ultimately defeated by the mob – departing without having touched the summit marker, having spent her allotted thirty minutes watching strangers scramble over rocks and elbow their way past her to reach a metal trig point first. “People were pushing and shoving and running past us,” she reported. The summit stands at 1,085 metres. The view from the moral high ground, one suspects, is considerably more pleasant. If the Kingdom cannot manage an orderly queue at the top of a mountain, this Author shudders to think what happens at the bottom.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.