The Silent Realm
Under Oat Milk
Tall Tales of an Alternate Totnes.
Meet Barry. Retired wind-chimes tuner of note, and now with one foot on the housing ladder, comfortably ensconced in a converted bottle bank behind Totnes Market Square.
It’s been a good life. His early days were checkered with left-field business start-ups, such as the Totnes Tantric Sex Chat Line, which to this day still has callers permanently on hold at a pound a minute.
Add to that three decades of dance-tent euphoria, fuelled by disco biscuits and Fuzzy-Felt conversations, and you have an affable, well-seasoned Totnesian. A champion of the outré, the daring, and occasionally, the tad dodgy. But you’ll not find a nicer person on the naughty step.
But the real humdinger, the one that put him on the WTF map, occurred late summer of 2001, when Barry was out pallet-boarding on the River Dart. Over enthused by a flurry of waving passengers from a passing ferry, he waved back with both hands, slipped from his improvised paddle board and splashed into the river’s muddied waters.
Fully submerged and entangled in the branches of a sunken bog-wood tree, he struggled to free himself. As his bubbled breath popped on the water’s surface, he saw his life flash by, and sadly the river took Barry from us.
Pulled from the water by a passing boater, para-medics tried several hail-Mary resuscitations on the flat-lined Barry. Just when all hope was lost, there was a blip, then a bleep, and with a spurt of river water, Barry coughed and returned to the land of the living.
Later, propped up on a hospital bed, with concerned family and friends surrounding him, Barry announced with evangelical gusto that he hadn’t died at all. He’d been on the ‘other side‘.
According to Barry, the afterlife is not the usual harp-twanging tropes you’d expect. It’s a hip, eternal Silent Disco.
Having been astrally plucked from his watery demise, he found himself standing at the entrance of a huge, silver-lined dance tent.
He rose and floated into the tent, staring down over the innumerable heavenly souls, all wearing wireless headphones, throwing shapes and listening to the music of their time. Many were old and frail, their milky cataracts lit up by the laser lights that fanned the dance floor.
Barry floated on as the majestic, silent tableau of dance styles, from present day to time immemorial unfolded beneath him. At the very back of the seemingly endless, heaving dance floor, he saw a sea of hairy-arsed Cro-Magnons, all double-dropped on fistfuls of magic mushrooms, recklessly barging into each other and randomly honking into bone flutes. And Barry wept. For he had witnessed the birth of Drum ‘n’ Bass.
It set Barry on a path, some might say lucratively.
He’s carved a pair of ‘sacred’ bog-wood headphones and now channels music from the Silent Disco Realm. His album, ‘Yo! Nazarene. Big Bethlehem Beats’ is charting on Spotify. A Netflix series called ‘Ramps, Not Amps’ is in the offing, where Barry spins decks at Silent Disco weekends, prepping pensioners for the Big Dance Tent in the sky.
Hand-crafted pendant versions of his bogwood headphones are for sale in all the over-priced Twig Shops in Totnes.
The more sceptical of you might raise an eyebrow, and think our Barry is more yarn than thread – but here’s the thing. Since his visit to the Silent Disco Realm, he’s been gifted with precognition. For the last few years, to the very day, he’s prophesied when the Totnes Christmas bins go out.
So there has to be some truth to it all. Surely?
Fancy More Oat Milk?