The Countryside: It’s the real track and field.
North Devon residents will be recreating and updating photographic scenes by James Ravilious in a series of tableaux across the district.
Corn will sprout in the fields in a depiction of ‘plenty’.
Lambs will enact realistic death scenes in slaughterhouses.
Televisions will be switched on and off in a symphony of channel-hopping in living rooms from Dawlish to Barnstaple.
Children will present a pageant of rolling down sand-dunes, jumping from bridges and falling off bikes.
Commuters and tractors will slowly process along the A303.
Strawberries will be exhibited on trestles in lay-bys.
Bunting will be over-used.
Rain will fall (and fall).
Bees will conduct a dance (with musical accompaniment) over the gardens of Teignbridge.
Seagulls will stage scenes of horror as they terrorise picnickers over the beaches of South Devon.
There will be a pilgrimage along the south west coast path.
We will become nostalgic.
We will build wind farms.
We will make a simulacrum of London and weep over it.
‘All over Britain farmers, trees, slugs, foxes, slaughterhouse workers, ramblers, tuberculosis mycobacteria, silage silos, green algae in duckponds and vicars on bicycles will join in a familiar and much-loved script to perform a day in the countryside. On a stage measuring 18.6 million hectares, in a production with a budget of over £20 million, muck will be spread and crops will be modified. As well as much-loved storylines of birth, death and rutting, we invite the people of the UK’s cities to join us for the day, to participate in a special track event: ‘The One Mile An Hour Stroll’; starting and finishing lines will be chosen by the participants. (No animals will be harmed in the making of this production – well quite a few, actually). ‘ Mytho Geography
(Early model/scenario, courtesy of Mythogeography) ‘In the performance a white man will arrive by car on the massive 18.6 million hectare stage, and rush from his vehicle to the nearest building, against a backdrop of synchronised wind farms, riotous behaviour of pollen-inebriated bees, flooding, loneliness, clotted cream teas, accidents, milking routines, mass mastication, the removal of hedges and the putting back in on hedges, and the setting aside of differences.’ Mythogeography