ACFM - #ACFM Microdose: Acid Camping

Episode Date: February 22, 2022

When he’s not working on #ACFM, show producer Matt Huxley is a musician. His recent EP under the name Muckers is the inspiration for this Microdose – a short audio essay about land, family, trespass and belonging. Recorded while out walking, Acid Camping considers who owns the landscape, the methods by which people have been driven […]

Hello and welcome to this microdose from ACFM. I'm Nadia Idol and this month we've got something a little bit different for you. Matt Huxley is one of our producers here at ACFM and when he's not molding our endless chat into a coherent podcast, he is a musician. He recently put out a release called Dingley Dell through his label Circle Dance and he's made this very acid audio essay you're about to hear, arranging musical themes and textures from the record to accompany the story he tells. You can find out more about Matt's work in the show notes. Enjoy. A few years ago to your friends of mine

went on a camping trip to the Essex countryside. They didn't have much gear and aren't at all outward-bound people. They told me that as they walked along, on multiple occasions someone would challenge them on where they were going, to which they'd happily reply, Oh, just to my uncle's field. That's what they told me too before they set off. But of course, there was no uncle, and such a field didn't exist. I found it a really funny phrase and for a while we played with it in our conversations and messages.

Part of the fun is simply in the rule breaking. There's a thrill in taking people in with such a cheery, innocent-sounding explanation for what is, of course, simply trespassing. In my reading of the story though, the uncle is a slightly mocking character. It strikes me particularly silly that It's My Uncle's Field would afford you any special rights. The fact that an imaginary uncle and his field can serve as an alibi for camping where you want shows us something about how deeply entwined the idea of the family is in land ownership. The family unit is the dominant way in which we imagine ownership of things. The imagined uncle is a selective list. So there's something fun and naughty in duping people like this, but it also opens up some

interesting reflections on the countryside. It asks questions of who gets to use land and in what way, about how land ownership, like lots of assets, is often concentrated in family structures and how people indistinctively respect those relations even when they don't exist. I'm hearing the way other walk has challenged my friends, how people like to discipline the way others use the land, even when they personally have nothing to gain. But what I also like about this story is that it faces forwards.

And they're telling, my friends are constantly walking towards Uncle's Field. The field functions not as a destination, but rather as a point of orientation, a horizon that recontextualise, etc. I don't know. I don't know. Oh. ...howan... ...when

...to... ...that... ...the ...the... Uncle's field is a horizon. Horizons allow you to map your place in a landscape, somewhere you can always be moving towards, that re-contextualises where you currently are. Typically, when we talk about horizons,

we might think about them spatially as a place in front of you, where the sun sets of the sky meets the land. Or we might think about them temporally, like lost horizons, what can. could have been, things in the past. But when I talk about a horizon, I'm talking about a dividing line that establishes where we are and in relation to which we get our bearings on where we're going. The horizon divides where we are now from where we could be, providing that point of difference

that helps produce the desire necessary to get there. So my friend's imaginary uncle's field was a useful destination, in the sense it distinguish them as property owners with the right to access their property. legalising, at least to the other walkers who challenged them on the way, their trespass. All horizons require this sort of destination to function, to validate the movement towards them, to produce directionality. Like the end of a rainbow, the horizon can never be reached, yet it demands us to act as if it could, inviting us to imagine what such a destination might look like. So, I'm going to be able to be.

So, what my uncles feel would look like if my friends were to ever reach it? I imagine the people they met and duped on their way had their own mental image of their destination. An enclosed patch of land, bordered with fences and hedges, exploited for economic purposes as arable or pasture land, like the rest of the English countryside. The landscape this produces, often understood as bucolic, unchanging, traditional, even natural, is shaped by centuries of land management. The quilt of fields and hedgerows that some people might think of as essentially English are not naturally occurring.

They've been created, often with violent implications. From the 13th to the 18th century, the process of enclosure, removing the rights of people, peasants to graze cattle, gather firewood and generally subsist, drove people off the land and forced them to sell their labour to earn a wage. The word forest, such a familiar landform, has a French derivation, denoting wild lands set aside for hunting. Landscapes were managed and ways of living fundamentally altered so that aristocratic landowners could hunt the wildlife on their land at the same time claiming that wildlife as their property. now but I'm lucky to have grown up in Brickport in Dorset.

For driving east, maybe to Bournemouth or London, you'll spend a good 10 minutes on the road alongside Charba Park. It's miles long brick wall perimeter and a statue of a five-legged deer mounted over the gates. Over the wall of 7,000 acres of woods, farmland and gardens. This is the family estate of Richard Drax, a current Tory MP. His is one example of the many historically wealthy families, who grew incredibly rich through the slave trade, laundering their dirty money into these massive mistakes, which they then keep closely guarded as part of the 93% of English land the public don't have rightly.

This is perhaps the uncle's field that takes shape in the minds of the countryside gatekeepers, privatised and patriarchally administered to appear as if it were ever so. My friend's imaginary uncle's field helps to denature these facts to point to their contingency and hopefully dissolve and denaturalize how we think about that. When we're out in the country, it's easy to see the horizon, but we also see everything that comes before it, the fields, the fields, the villages and towns,

Dublin, telephone pylons, wind farms. Behind that high estate wall or enclosed in fences, we see places we cannot go. Part of our thwarted desires are the things between where we walk and the horizon. As we clamber over styles, follow the rights of way and close the gates behind us, we experience these barriers to freedom as imminent to the environment, inevitable. I think of the walk to uncle's field as a way to denaturalise these barriers. It's an actively invented and radical destination. It's not around the corner or even across the road.

It's over the horizon, straight up, cutting across and through all obstacles and boundaries, reconfiguring and reorienting the entire landscape. Getting there requires subversion, subterfuge, breaking the rules, turning things upside down. We are required to ignore the boundaries already existing in our path if we're to get to where we're going. Once we defamiliarize these ideas, melt away our expectations that in order to have something, it must belong to us or our family. We can start to imagine new forms of communality, new joyful ways of living. We will never arrive at Uncle's Field. It's a journey that matters,

a journey that pre-configures and works to produce a destination through acting as if such a destination exists. The act of walking towards it, and the fun to be had as we do it, changes us. I don't know. I'm gonnae. I'm gonnae. Oh, man. I don't know. Oh, man.

Oh! I don't know. Oh, man. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. Go ahead. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I'm sorry. I don't know. I'm sorry.

I don't know. I'm going to be able to be.