Philip Purser-Hallard needs more sleep as he now thinks that flabby white legs are de rigueur

I’m well aware that these blogs won’t be winning any Pulitzer Prizes, but I do wonder whether their quality declines visibly on a daily basis, as sleep deprivation, caffeine poisoning and the out-workings in the world of organic real ale take their heavy toll.

In some respects it’s lucky that Greenbelt only lasts three days. After a week of this I’d be writing ‘I went to a music thing. It was a good music thing. A pretty lady sang us songs. They were good songs. (Will this do? PPH)’

As it is, I’m still capable of naming and describing, with some degree of coherency, the highlights of my past 24 hours.

Given my own interests, I could hardly miss Andrew Wooding’s talk on ‘Doctor Who and the Search for God’.

(This year’s is a good programme for talks on media science fiction. Sadly I missed Judith Gunn on Battlestar Galactica, but I’m hoping to get to Vic Thiessen on ‘A New Dawn for Humanity? Finding God in Sci-Fi Films’ this afternoon.)

Andrew’s talk was child-friendly but impressively undumbed-down, a whistle-stop tour of spiritual themes in the old and new series of Doctor Who.

His enthusiasm for the series in all its incarnations (and for its creators, whether Christian, Buddhist or atheist) is deeply infectious.

As a long-term Doctor Who fan who’s been rather out of touch with child-culture for the past twentymumble years, I was gobsmacked at the knowledge the audience – most of them too young to remember Paul McGann as the Doctor, let alone Sylvester McCoy – had of the series past and present.

The teenage girl who entered Andrew’s soundalike competition as Sil was a particular revelation.

Last night I was at the venue formerly known as the Winged Ox bar, where the Brighton-based alt-worship group The Garden have had an installation based around museum display cases.

The group’s members were scheduled to perform a ‘transformative encounter’ around the exhibits, followed by a discussion of the event and the audience’s responses.

The piece itself was fascinating and at times moving, although I wasn’t altogether convinced by the overall theme of the death of the story.

As a writer I of course have a vested interest – but it seemed to me that the performance argued for a different way of constructing stories, which remain the building-blocks of human thought.

Non-linear, fragmentary or interactive stories – increasingly important as they are in our complex 21st-century world – are still stories, and a faith which takes them as its basis is no less a faith.

Atheism

Much of the discussion centred around the apparent atheism of the drama we’d seen, but the Death of God is no less a story than the Gospel narrative.

This fits in with my own narrative-based spirituality in ways which I found difficult to articulate – possibly due to the aforementioned sleep deprivation and caffeine abuse. Nonetheless, the performance and discussion between them were the most interesting experience I’ve had at Greenbelt 2008.

I’ll end by surrendering my last pretensions to even vague coherence by mentioning one final revelation from this year’s Greenbelt: I’ve discovered that I thoroughly approve of cargo shorts.

Their multiplicity of superfluous pockets allows you to sort your items with a degree of specificity never achieved by any previous clothing technology.

What’s more, they make you look hip, trendy and ‘down with the kids’, and not remotely like an unfit middle-aged worker-from-home who lacks the basic good taste and human decency to cover up his flabby white legs.

If you haven’t managed to get to this year’s festival, I’ll be modelling them again in 2009.

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