Holy cow! Festival fun is back in the field (From Stroud News and Journal)

Holy cow! Festival fun is back in the field

Adventurer, traveller, musician and Nailstock organiser Hamish Guerrini may look like a maddened castaway, but beneath the bushy beard is a man who has gone a long way to think big thoughts. With the annual Nailsworth Festival due to start on Saturday, SNJ reporter Will Saunders spoke to the Ruskin Mill worker about his life on the road and what he thinks of his Five Valleys home.

HE looks like the better class of hobo but his accent is so sharp you could shave with it. He talks quite comfortably about philosophy and the essential one-ness of creation but is perfectly happy to disguise his car as a cow. One-time musical hermit, wanderer, performer and Nailstock co-ordinator Hamish Guerrini is truly a riddle wrapped in an enigma.

As a staff member at education centre Ruskin Mill and lead singer of Nailsworth band the Mad Cows, the 33-year-old is certainly a well-known figure in the town.

Hamish, who is married with two children, Noah, 4, and Grace, 2, has been playing music and singing with his many brothers and sister all his life and attributes his love of the stage to growing up with so many musical siblings.

"I came from a big family," he said. "There were six of us, five boys and a girl and in a big family you have to shout to be heard. The performer in you is unveiled.

"Also I had Irish and Italian parents, which makes for quite an expressive mixture.

"We are all musical and all love singing and playing music together. Our house was always full of ribaldry and sound."

After growing up in London, Hamish spent the last two years of his schooling at a Benedictine monastery school near Bath, an experience he said he thoroughly enjoyed despite a lack of religious zeal.

"It was really brilliant," he said. "The Benedictines are just quite a fun-loving sort of gang."

After the monastery it seemed a logical progression to start a degree in Theology and Philosophy in Birmingham.

"I suppose it was a way of counterbalancing all that religion," Hamish said, "to try and understand all that dogma I had been encouraged to believe in."

But the course didn't suit Hamish and he switched to Cheltenham to study English and Performing Arts. While in the Spa town he met his first love - a somewhat unconventional truck.

"I got it for £1,600 from a guy named Tinker Tim," explained Hamish.

"He was a Romany gypsy and he was living in it with his missus and his son. She was about to have another baby and it was getting a bit too small.

"I saw this beast and fell in love."

The love affair got off to a fine start throughout the 90s, with eight years of on-and-off travelling.

Through much of this time Hamish lived a largely contented life ambling around Europe in the back of the gypsy truck, playing music to earn a living.

"I did a few seasons in the Alps, in Val d'sere, skiing all day and playing music at night," he said.

"I was living in the truck, which was fun, because it had a wood-burning stove, so despite temperatures of minus 25 outside I was in there in a t-shirt.

"There were blizzards up to the windows most nights and inside I was roasting. It was great fun."

The time abroad helped Hamish develop his song-writing ability. Although many of his own songs relate to events in his own life he is happy to admit some of it is made up.

"A lot of it is poetic licence," he said.

"A lot of it is autobiographical. Sometimes I will disguise that and sometimes I go ahead and bare it all.

"When I sing a song I go into this other world and into a different zone. It really feels good for me, really nourishes me."

Hamish's travels also took him beyond Europe. He hitchhiked - and skateboarded - up the west coast of America, saw Australia, New Zealand and the Far East.

"I wanted to travel for the same reason anyone wants to travel - to see what is around the next bend, what is over the next hill, what everyone else is doing," he said.

"I had a great interest in checking out the world. One has to do the grand tour."

While globe-trotting Hamish developed his social conscience, attending hippy anti-nuclear rallies in Sydney and helping New Zealanders protest against World Trade Organisation regulations.

"It was so sad to see a country so proud of its self-sufficiency being forced by international regulation to give it up," he said.

But why care? Why did Hamish worry about a situation happening thousands of miles away from your home that would never affect him?

"I am not a great believer in flags and differentiation between people," he said.

"If I do have a religion it's that we are all in the same boat, all brothers and sisters.

"The crystallisation of my thoughts after my years of travel was that we are all part of one big universe.

"We come from the same place and we all return to the same place and that is about it as far as my spirituality goes.

"To help each other is to help oneself. If one is not of service to one's fellow human beings there is not much point in existing, or at least not much satisfaction to existing."

It was this compulsion that led Hamish to Nailsworth and the education centre at Ruskin Mill.

After returning from his long years of travelling he went back to London, married his sweetheart Caroline, and had baby Noah.

The young family wanted to move to the country and a call from an old college friend from Cheltenham put Hamish in touch with Ruskin Mill.

"I came down to take a look and immediately asked for an interview," he said.

"It was like coming home for me. My mother's family are all from Painswick, going back hundreds of years, so I did feel an affinity with the area."

After initially working as a support worker he went to plough a different furrow, so to speak, on the centre's farm.

Although he admits tending sheep and pigs knee-deep in muck was a hard thing to get used to for a city boy, Hamish says he still gets great satisfaction from the job, particularly his work with the students.

"I love the job," he said. "For me it is a great symbiotic relationship. It is great that there is an institution which has so much to offer so many people."

An embryonic Nailstock first came along in 2002, with Hamish and two of his brothers playing in Cossack Square. Two years ago they decided to move it up to King George V playing field, and Nailstock was born.

"I thought if the weather's good enough we could have it outside. Then this beautiful natural amphitheatre was begging to be used, so we set up with a stage made out of planks with an old carpet chucked over the top.

"It reminded me of an old saying of my dad's: 'The only thing better than a party is another party'."

The concert was a huge success and last year's Nailstock was bigger still, with hundreds of revellers enjoying the bands and the sunshine.

"The weather was one of the contributory factors to its success but the main thing was the amazing community here," said Hamish.

"It is great to see a community policing itself and organising its own entertainment.

"There are a lot of very creative people in this area. It is like Hobbit land - they all come out of their hobbit holes and suddenly things just happen."

Nailstock begins with a parade from the market square in Nailsworth at 3pm on Saturday,. Anyone who like to help with informal stewarding on Saturday or litter picking on Sunday can call Hamish on 07884 490623.