Abnormal Service Will Not Be Resumed

I've often thought that people who live at the water's edge are both our ancestors and our inheritors. They live on the margins. At once far from civilisation and yet closer to it than those who live in the bosom of society, they survive on the wreckage, on what survives the water as sea-containers split and spill, and ends up like this lot, on Terschelling Island, off northern Holland recently did. It was hard to find pairs, apparently.

I visited this beautiful, low lying island once, in a 1979 1600 VW camper van. Although I already felt outside of everything I had previously known, and I was in a sense isolated and in the unknown, I remember having the most remarkable time.

The performance festival was ten days long, an international phenomenon with acts from South America, Spain, Poland, France, Italy, Ireland, Australia. It was here I first saw the work of the great Kantor. My beautiful but rather stroppy girlfriend was in a messed up work relationship and couldn't get over that some guy she'd been involved with was there with a bunch of weirdo menage-a-million processional yoga types. But, what the hell, I found an eighth of really fresh hash just lying on the ground on day two, which made all the difference, I can tell you.

I remember putting up with a fuck of a lot and being totally cheerful despite everything. Bicycling everywhere, sleeping in the van, hanging around with two body-obsessed sexy female performers. I wasn't getting a lot but it didn't matter. I was having a lot of fun. The fact that we'd got the van over on this 10k x 1k island was a minor miracle - it put us in the select few to have motorised wheels, so we could explore the island, and get to most performances we wanted without leg death.

It was fabulous, being so close to the north sea, on such a low-lying, windswept place, far from the mainland, surrounded by gorgeous looking happy people and heart-filling horizons. Some part of me never left the island.