Under the watchful eye of fauna and flora, I was standing in woodlands as a log-perched audience listened to my conversation with physicist David Tonge about the difficulty of working out how the universe began. Humans have done well. We’ve got as far back as 10 to minus 37, maybe even minus 38 of a second, it’s just that last, tiny weeny bit that’s proving difficult to work out. One of the joys of summer is to talk among the trees at festivals. This time, I was at Also Festival: a field, a lake and woodland where authors, philosophers and scientists talk to those reclining in nature about what is the self, and the possibility of life on other planets. That’s just the start of it.
Across the field are models of the sun and the planets that orbit it, some hung and some floating. When the sun did swell into a red giant on the Saturday night, or rather when the crate wood sun was set on fire in a ceremony mixing paganism and cosmology, I was pleased to see that, unscientifically, the planets had remained where they are, though Jupiter was beginning to droop a little.
I learned more about the importance of connection and how to achieve it in the very environment where connections were being made across the field. Natalie Haynes educated us about classical goddesses under a sky with just enough cracks in the clouds that some of them might have been watching her.
I also discovered more about AI through tales of a blue whale with a very small penis (the work of Andy Stanton, creator of the beautifully stupid Mr Gum stories, though this adventure into ChatGPT verged on the certificate 15).
- Glastonbury 2024 is over, but its magic will take longer to fade
- Robin Ince: Slash, hobbits and walrus vomit at Wētā Workshop
In between, people canoed and swam in the lake, but not me. I have a habit of coming up in hives if I attempt such things. I once had a harsh allergic reaction to a Center Parc. Though Christmas is some distance away (in actual days but not in terms of capitalism gearing up to hypnotising us into consumption), I would like to share a marvellous prank passed on by Joel Morris as he talked of his book about comedy. Two children broke into the crackers the night before Christmas and carefully changed the punchline of every joke so, whatever the set-up, the punchline was “spooktacles!” – a delightful bit of gag vandalism.
Also Festival is a reminder of how walls and ceilings and artificial light is not always the best environment to be educated in; there is something about the freedom of listening under the sky that makes ideas more sticky and exciting. The theories seem to float to you in a friendly way. There is also the joy of how the ideas are shared afterwards under oaks and in the queues for ice cream.
