This was my second Glastonbury festival. I first went back in 2005, and having survived the flooding of that year, I really thought we had seen the worst of what the Glastonbury weather could throw at us.

We hadn’t.

Wednesday 20th June

Me and Rachel set off at about 11am. The others would meet us there, although as the only ones driving we were carrying all of their beer, in the back of Rachel’s Nissan Micra. We were expecting some fairly nasty traffic jams, but apart from some tailbacks around Stonehenge it was a fairly easy journey – despite about 50% of the traffic being clearly festival-bound, laden with rucksacks, sleeping bags and crates of cheap lager. Nobody was travelling in as much style as these people though:

Click the pictures for a bigger version. I’m referring to the Routemaster, not the truck of course. It said “Glastonbury” on the destination board, and had “2007″ as the route number. Despite my jealousy, I gave a cheery wave and received one in return.

Eventually the roads got smaller and narrower, and then there were just corrugated iron tracks over open fields, and some places with no tracks at all. It was fairly rough going but we managed to park up, Micra intact. And then we began the long trek to the festival site with our rucksacks, sleeping bags and tent.

Nick, Alan and Katie had trudged around for ages looking for somewhere to camp. In 2005 we were pitched on the hill opposite the Pyramid stage, clearly the best place in the entire site for those who didn’t want flooded tents. Unfortunately everybody else was now wise to this, which is why that campsite was full by noon. We ended up having to camp at the opposite end of the site, in an area that was new this year, near The Park.

There was still plenty of space there, though it did fill up eventually.

We pitched our tents and then went back to pick up the beer from the car. This was about one hour’s trudge away – even longer when you stop off for some pear cider on the way. We had brought along three crates of beer, two boxes of wine, some vodka, some Jack Daniels, some Pimms and 36 cans of Coke. Fortunately Katie had brought along a trolley. Unfortunately it was not really designed for lugging such a huge weight across miles of farmland. Some people had brought wheelbarrows, which seemed like a much better idea.

It was a pleasant, sunny evening, and there were waves of cheers going around the entire festival. And there was no mud around whatsoever - if only it could have stayed that way.

In the evening we went to check out the Stone Circle. Every minute or so, somebody would let off a kind of hot-air-balloon-lantern thing, to a massive cheer. We sat around listening to the drumming for a bit, soaking up the atmosphere. It was still dry. But we knew what the weather forecast said, so we went to bed and waited for the rain to come.

Thursday 21st June

It had rained a bit, but the festival site was still reasonably dry – certainly not muddy. It was my 25th birthday, and things felt much the same as ever, except I was beginning to feel slightly less clean than I had been when I was 24. It was still four days before I could have my next shower.

Although there are a few events taking place on Thursday, the festival doesn’t start properly until Friday, which meant we had a day to explore the site and generally relax. Chris and Kirsty arrived at about lunchtime, and we spent the afternoon wandering around, seeing what curious things we could find.

Here’s the Miniscule of Sound, the world’s smallest nightclub. This was absolutely fabulous in 2005. Unfortunately we missed it this year, although I think it shut prematurely because of the mud. It’s a perfect piss-take of shitty little clubs. Outside a sign says “NO. By order of the management”.

I had a rather tasty burger and then we went to the indoor cinema tent, where we started to watch Serenity. Unfortunately Rachel lost her wallet, and it was impossible to find it in the dark crowded tent where everybody was trying to be quiet. We had a quick look after the film had finished, when people had cleared out and the lights were back on, but we were out of luck.

Rachel went up to Worthy Farm to file a lost property report, while me, Nick and Alan moved to the outside cinema field to watch Ghostbusters. There was a good atmosphere - everyone was singing along to the theme tune and shouting random comments. To the extent that you couldn’t really follow the film. But that would have been a rather foolish expectation really.

Alan got chatting to an incredibly drunk girl who wrote her phone number on his arm. She changed her mind about this three digits from the end though, so she then subtly wrote down a load of random numbers, which meant she appeared to have a 20-digit phone number. We know she changed her mind three digits from the end because she later forgot her reservations and entered her correct phone number in Alan’s phone, and then rang herself.

We dragged Alan away from his very temporary friend, and headed once more to the Stone Circle. Rachel had bought me a trilby as a birthday present from one of the stalls. We sat around a large candle thing, and once again people were letting off the lantern things (they probably have proper names). Much alcohol was consumed. I was very sleepy.

Friday 22nd June

The festival begins properly on Friday, and to set the tone, it was absolutely pouring with rain. It was starting to get muddy. Kirsty’s enormous rainbow golfing umbrella was useful for keeping me and my trilby dry.

We went to the Jazz World stage to see Guilty Pleasures. This is a club night that plays all those records you’re not supposed to admit to liking, and they’d come to Glastonbury to get various acts to perform their own renditions of the guilty pleasures lurking in their record collections. I’ve completely forgotten who performed Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart, probably because I’d never heard of them and wasn’t paying attention, but it was good fun. Various other acts performed various other songs. It’s a good job I’ve never considered a career in journalism. Finally, Suggs performed Love is in the Air. He was wearing a hat quite a lot like the one I was wearing.

We went to explore a bit more of the festival site, now that more of it was open. There was a maze in the Cabaret field populated by a man in a suit who told you to “get lost”, a fortune teller and some moving topiary. To leave the maze you had to follow a rather scary farmer into a small shed. Truly bizarre and a good example of the kind of weirdness that sets Glastonbury apart from other festivals – I really wonder why people bother taking drugs when there’s this kind of shit going on.

There’s much more crazy stuff in Lost Vagueness, which we had a quick look at. We sat and had a cup of coffee and some apple pie in an American-style diner where the seats were old dodgems.

We headed to the Other Stage and watched Super Furry Animals followed by The Coral. We then went to The Park, where the mud was making walking difficult, to meet up again with Nick and Alan and to catch the end of Martha Wainwright. Then we went back again to the Other Stage to see her outrageously camp brother, Rufus Wainwright.

We had some food. Food at the festival was pretty good, and there was plenty of variety. A giant Yorkshire pudding filled with sausage and mash provided some much-needed stodge to absorb the alcohol:

Despite the mud, people were having a good time, although this young festival-goer didn’t seem to be enjoying himself much: 

 

We saw Arcade Fire. The sky had cleared up a bit:

We saw Bjork, who went way beyond our expectations of sheer mentalness. Again, why people choose to do drugs at Glastonbury when there’s such large levels of real strangeness, I don’t know. And you can always leave Bjork when you’ve had enough, so we did.

It was still early enough to avoid the queues at Silent Disco, so that’s where we headed. There are no large speakers pumping out large beats – instead you get given headphones when you go in. There were two DJs playing, and the headphones are linked to one of them. One of the DJs was playing a good selection of dance music, while the other one was playing some of the worst records I’ve ever heard. Between us we had one set of headphones for the good DJ, and three for the crap one. Things started to look up when he played Stealers Wheel’s Stuck in the Middle With You, but unfortunately he decided to play an amazingly tedious ultra-long version which, for all I know, still hasn’t finished as I type this some two weeks later. Fortunately of course, you could just take off the headphones, and listen to the half of the crowd who had the good DJ singing along to Praise You by Fatboy Slim.

Saturday 23rd June

We got up fairly late and went to see The Bees on the Jazz World stage, who were surprisingly good. Then we headed to the Tipi field in search of a cup of tea (I wondered if there was also a Coffipi field. No-one laughed).

We walked past the mud-wrestling pit and sat down on our camping chairs near the fire. It then rained very hard for about ten minutes and I wished I had a poncho like everybody else – I had a waterproof jacket but my trousers were soaked. The fire was still burning though so I went to dry myself off, and the sight of steam rising from my nether regions was a glory to behold.

We explored a bit more and then headed to the Other Stage to see Maximo Park. Me and Nick then went to the Dance Village to catch Hybrid and a little bit of Mr Scruff.

Then me and Rachel headed to Lost Vagueness, as we’d heard that Madness and Fatboy Slim were doing a semi-secret performance in The Ballroom. It was already full and there was over an hour to go before they came on, but there was a screen outside. We went inside a tent that had old cinema seats inside it and watched a very bizarre performance by three women in nurses’ uniforms. I didn’t really understand what was going on – it involved a recording of David Attenborough and an illuminated womb – but it was nice to have a sit down.

As we left we discovered that Madness had started their performance early. There was a huge crowd both inside the tent and outside, watching the screen. Unfortunately we couldn’t hear anything outside – despite our chants of “turn it up!”. It seemed fairly pointless hanging around, as there was no way we could ever get inside, so we headed back to our tent.

Nick built a fire and I fell asleep in front of it.

Sunday 24th June

I headed up to Worthy Farm with Rachel to see if her wallet had been handed in (it hadn’t), and on the way we caught a bit of the Marley brothers on the Pyramid stage, who were busily making their way through their father’s back catalogue. Then we headed to the Dance Village to catch ex-Orbital member Phil Hartnoll’s new venture, Long Range. I’ve seen them perform a couple of times before, and they weren’t much different this time apart from a lack of live vocalists (except for my least favourite track Your Face).

We went back to the tent to get some more alcohol, and then went to get some food. We missed the first bit of Shirley Bassey on the Pyramid stage, which was unfortunately the only bit to include songs I’d ever heard of. It seemed strange for her not to at least finish on one of the Bond themes, but then she was a strange choice for a strange festival, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised.

Me and Nick wandered around the Cabaret and Circus areas for a bit and caught some of Mitch Benn. Then we went back to the Pyramid stage to rejoin the others for the Kaiser Chiefs, stopping off for a tasty falafel on the way.

Kirsty was precariously perched on top of a bin:

Me, Nick, Alan and Chris stayed at the Pyramid stage for The Who, though Alan’s enjoyment was somewhat reduced as he had stumbled at a urinal and was covered in “piss mud”:

The Who finished, but the festival wasn’t over. We went to Trash City where we took a look at the freak show and then went to the 1970s New York gay bar, where entry cost £1 which got you a fake moustache. After three days of Glastonbury I’d lost my ability to find anything particularly strange any more.

I went off to find Rachel, who was playing African drums in a tent in the Cabaret field. Obviously. I joined in for a while and then managed to drag her away, for she could quite happily have stayed there all night. We rejoined the others and we then tried to find some entertainment. It was absolutely pouring with rain and we were all incredibly tired. We decided we’d had enough, and began the slow walk through miles of mud back to our tents.

We sat and had a hot dog in the crappy burger tent near where were camped. It was 4am and it was still pouring with rain. Nick’s face sums up the mood at this point:

Monday 25th June

Me and Rachel were the last to leave, as everybody else was booked on coaches. We had been warned that there would be long queues to get out of the site, so we decided not to leave until quite late. This meant we had the entire day to fill up the car.

We were rather hung over and all around us was a scene of devastation, with countless discarded tents and huge amounts of rubbish:

We made two trips to the car to load up our stuff. It took us all afternoon – it was very slow going with all the mud, and our rucksacks were heavy with all the mud attached to the clothing inside. In the car parks, traffic wasn’t moving very much. Cars were having to get through some big puddles and plenty of vehicles were getting stuck in mud. We decided that we definitely didn’t want to leave the car park on that small track on which we’d driven in on Wednesday.

We were finally ready to leave the car park at 6pm. I started the car and we moved four yards in an attempt to join the queue to one of the exits. The queue was going nowhere. Half an hour later, it still hadn’t moved, but we saw behind us another queue which was slowly but steadily moving. It was that track that we had decided we definitely didn’t want to go down. But we decided to give it a try – if other cars were making it, surely ours could too.

So I started the car again and we went to move to the other queue. But we were stuck. I got out to push and Rachel sat in the driver’s seat. We were helped along by a couple of other guys, and managed to make it to the queue. It took us another hour to finally leave the festival site, and it was pretty tough going – not least when we had to be pushed by a tractor through some particularly thick mud. It was an appropriately surreal and muddy ending to a surreal and muddy festival.

It was a long drive back, and me and Rachel swapped several times as we were both very tired. Every service station on the way back to London was full of Glastonbury traffic – muddy cars and muddy people. We finally arrived home at about 1am, and I was so happy to get the bath I’d been dreaming about for days.

Again?

I was pretty sure, as I lay in my bath, that I didn’t want to go to Glastonbury again. At least, not for a very long time. You have to give up so much when you slum it in a field for the best part of a week that you have to wonder whether it’s worth the hassle. I was pretty sure that it was worth the hassle, but maybe only once in a lifetime. It’s definitely a worthwhile experience – pure escapism from the real world – but it’s just such a huge amount of effort.

I’ve been back for two weeks now, and I’ve still got quite a few things to clean the mud from. But in my mind the ordeal of Monday and the irritation I felt at the constant rain has faded a bit, and I’m able to focus more on what a fantastic time I had despite all the hardships. And I find I’m missing it slightly. I probably will return, maybe not next year but quite possibly in 2009.

After all, the weather couldn’t possibly get any worse – could it?

I’ve tried to piece together as much as I can remember about Glastonbury in some kind of photo-blog format, so here it is.

Wednesday 22nd June

Our journey began, lugging rucksacks to Victoria to catch a coach at 1pm, due to arrive a Glastonbury at around 4.30pm.

Nick eagerly awaits the next District line train.

I also await the next Disrict line train eagerly, but do my best to hide it.

We arrived at Victoria. We bought some sandwiches. We then ate them. But this isn’t the time for annoying little details. The important thing is that we got on the coach.

A couple of hours later, we stopped at a service station on the M4. For 50 minutes. I’ve no idea why we needed that long – maybe the driver needed to do a really big shit.

Nick used the time to catch some sun, while I hid in the shade as I burn really easily. As you will soon see.

Anyway, we eventually arrived at Glastonbury despite heavy traffic and the coach driver being told to go down the wrong road. I was really quite impressed with his three-point turn though.

After all the warnings about the increased security – all the tickets were marked with the holder’s name and address, and you had to bring a driving licence or a “Citizen Card” – I was somewha disappointed when they didn’t even seem to bother paying much attention to the details on my ticket or driving licence. We had arrived well before the big rush on Thursday – I can imagine I could probably have blagged my way in with a Tesco ClubCard.

Wristband securely attached, the next step was to find where to camp. We had arranged to meet up with some people from the Orbital website forums, who I was told were camped on the hill opposite the Pyramid stage. This probably would have made sense if I’d been there before, and it took several phone calls before we were even looking in the correct field. Eventually we found the right place and pitched our tent.

Quite a lot of people had arrived before us.

View towards the Pyramid Stage. The power lines were a handy landmark, even though they did crackle annoyingly, and cause us to wonder – can you get leukaemia in five days?

After pitching the tent, we set off to explore.

There’s plenty of hippy stuff around, of course.

About as hippy as it gets is the Stone Circle. Though you can’t really see the stones in this picture.

This is the area opposite the Jazz World stage. You can clearly see the best bar on site here - it sells pear cider. Fantastic stuff – crisp, tasty and refreshing. You can also get strawberry and lemon flavours, but it’s the base pear product that can’t be beaten. Later in the festival I had a pint of Blackthorn and it tasted like mud in comparison.

There are plenty of toilets around, and I don’t recall seeing anybody actually pissing in any streams or hedges so I suppose these signs work well.

Another sculpture. There was another sculpture nearby made entirely of wellies, of two people trying to pull a third out of the ground. I didn’t take a picture of that though. It wasn’t as aesthetically pleasing as these cows – in fact it was rather horrible.

As sunset approached, we went back to the Stone Circle, which was full of hippies cheering the sunset and playing the drums.

I set this picture up very carefully, so as to avoid the naked man who was sitting on one of the stones.

As you can see, night mode on my phone really is crap. We stayed around the stone circle for a while, watching people playing with fire.

When all that fire juggling got boring, we went to a hippy cinema thing where we watched a rather eclectic selection of short films, which included Willo the Wisp and coverage of last year’s Circle Line Party.

And then we returned to the tent, passing this sculpture by the Leftfield stage on the way.

Thursday 23rd June

Thursday was incredibly sunny. Nick sought flipflops. I sought shade. The only shelter from the sun I could find was behind one of those flags by the Jazz World stage. Unfortunately the wind changed direction and I got bad sunburn.

They would have provided great shelter, if they didn’t flap about so much.

Still, most people were enjoying the sun.

Sitting around with a pint of pear cider in your hand, everything was pretty sweet – and the festival hadn’t even started properly yet.

Even I was smiling.

Yep, life was good.

I had even managed to get myself into some shade for a while.

This is a poo truck, though it’s actually collecting wee. In the foreground are some recycling bins. Apparently they turn all those paper plates and forks that get used during the festival into compost. Compost that I imagine tastes of ketchup.

Here’s the Pyramid Stage. Not much happening.

Back by the Jazz World stage where they were doing a sound check. They were actually playing some pretty good tunes – until they started playing Mike and the Mechanics.

Drugs are illegal at Glastonbury of course – like that stops anybody. But if you wanted to get mashed on nothing but oregano and sage, you could probably do worse than go to this “Herbal Highs” store. Though why the hell you would want to is anybody’s guess.

Back at the tent, I realised the full extent of my sunburn.

That evening, the Dance Lounge kicked off with a set by, err, somebody. It wasn’t particularly good. But the decorations outside were.

We returned to the tent, lit a camp fire, then sat around drinking and eating pretzels and Haribo.

In the distance, we could see back to the Stone Circle at the other end of the site, where once again people had gathered and lit fires. It looked like a sky full of yellow twinkling stars. It had been a gloriously sunny day and everybody was looking forward to the start of the festival. If the weather was going to stay like this, we couldn’t really ask for more – though maybe a small amount of rain to cool off our sunburn would be nice.

With a small amount of drizzle our prayers were answered. The lightning was pretty cool as well. Over at the Stone Circle, the flickering specks were becoming more sparse. It was time to go to bed…

Friday 24th June

It was the early hours of Friday morning and I was trying to sleep. Rain was really pounding down on our tent. It was very loud – where were my earplugs? Oh. They were already in my ears. Thunder crashed throughout the night. It sounded like we were getting rather more rain than we had asked for.

Getting out of the tent that morning, the ground was a little soggy. We heard on a neighbour’s radio that there was going to be a delay to most of the stages kicking off. It seemed a bit extreme – surely they could have been prepared for a little bit of rain..?

We went down the hill to find some breakfast – and quickly found out just how much rain there had actually been.

Ah. If I wanted breakfast, I was going to have to wade - or wait in the long queues for those stalls which had put wooden pallets out. Nick braved the water and went to get some paella. The chef was frowning - where was that Glastonbury spirit? Then Nick saw he was standing in a foot of water – just like everybody else.

Here is a video showing what we had to put up with if we wanted to get anywhere.

Apparently somebody got stuck in a portaloo. Wonder if it’s that one in the third row?

Walking around the site, it was clear how lucky we were to be camping with festival veterans who knew the best places to camp. I’m glad we didn’t camp here.

Here is a video of the scene of devastation above – and the two chaps who were canoeing through it, picking up cans of beer.

There was mud. Absolutely everywhere.

Nick had bought some flipflops the previous day. It really wasn’t the weather for them now. As his boots were uncomfortable, for some reason he thought the best option would be to go around barefoot. This is what a foot looks like when you do that at Glastonbury after it has flooded.

On the other hand, my feet were mostly dry, even if my boots had turned the same colour as absolutely everything else.

But nobody was going to let a little bit of mud spoil the fun.

Even if everybody does look really grumpy in these pictures.

Apart from me and Nick of course – and that cheeky bastard in the middle there.

Wellies were apparently selling for £45. Fights were breaking out in the queues. It does smack of poor planning though – I mean, I’d never been to Glastonbury before, but I knew Glastonbury was famous for mud. Leaving the boots at home and just packing the sandals would surely have been foolhardy.

It had been overcast all day. There was no sign of that mud drying up
any time soon.

Walking near the Other Stage was difficult. No wonder nobody was dancing much.

The toilets were actually mostly pretty clean. But here’s an example of one that wasn’t. I’m hopeful that the brown stuff is in fact mud. There was, after all, plenty to go round.

These kids were queuing for a tap. I wonder if they successfully avoided a stern telling-off from their mothers?

We had some tea in the tipi field, and went off to see comedian Stewart Lee – safely sheltered in the Cabaret tent, though the floor was soggy and I got a wet arse. Lee put in a fantastic performance as always, though it was pretty much exactly the same material as when I saw him about nine months previously. But then it’s a good job I have a poor memory for jokes, as it was still bloody funny.

Back to the Other Stage for Royksopp, who were excellent. It was definitely the best music for these girls to go mud wrestling (video).

Fatboy Slim followed, and was absolutely fantastic, despite expectations.

They gave out some glasses, and when you put them on, the bright lights made smiley faces appear. Which was odd.

We went to the Dance area for a bit to see if anything interesting was happening. Somehow Nick managed to lose the bag that contained my suncream and aftersun. I was rather annoyed and sent him off to find it, while I trudged back to the tent. Back at base camp, I moaned at him on the phone for a while and then lay down to sleep outside my tent. Fortunately this was spotted by everybody else sitting round the camp fire and I was sent to bed. Apparently while I was doing this, Nick had somehow left the festival entirely. Fortunately he took his ticket with him and was allowed back in again.

By this point the batteries on my phone were running out. I queued twice over the weekend for the Orange “Chill & Charge” tent but I was only able to get limited juice into my phone. Hence there are somewhat fewer pics for the remainder of the festival.

Saturday 25th June

At least it didn’t rain overnight. But then it hadn’t been sunny on Friday, and so everything was still pretty much as wet and muddy as it had been. There was plenty of stuff to see to take our minds off it though. Unfortunately I don’t have many pictures of it.

We sat at the tent for a while, watching a few of the early acts on the Pyramid Stage which was conveniently visible, as you can see in this picture. That morning featured belly dancers and Goldie Lookin Chain.

I went to the loo and managed to lose Nick entirely for the duration of the Kaiser Chiefs. By some fluke I managed to bump into him just after they finished, and so our adventure continued.

We saw the Steve Frost Improv All-Stars, which had been rescheduled from Friday. We had to sit through the rantings of an annoyingly unfunny old hippy to get a seat, but it was well worth it.

I thought New Order were fantastic, although I hear the telly coverage looked a bit poo so maybe you just had to be there. My only complaint would be that, bizarrely, they didn’t play Blue Monday. Criminal.

After the main acts had finished there was still entertainment to be had, including a queue for the “world’s smallest nightclub”, the Miniscule of Sound. It was apparently Fisherman’s Hour – anyone in the fishing industry “gets free and direct access to the club”. A bouncer in a Nazi costume barked “are you in ze fishing industry!?” while we waited to get in. Eventually we did, and as the name suggested, it really was very small. The music was pretty good as well.

Another camp fire finished the night. The shouts of “bollocks!” going round the camp site, which seems to be something of a Glastonbury tradition, somehow mutated into shouts of “Fuck Coldplay”, “Fuck Keane as well” and “Stephen Hawking fucking Coldplay up the ass”. I presume there had to be some kind of logic behind it all.

Sunday 26th June

Sunday was a much sunnier day.

Oooh arrr.

This is the Tipi field, with me and Nick in it.

In the John Peel tent, we saw the Dresden Dolls. They are quite bizarre to watch – no fancy visuals or anything, just a singer/pianist and a drummer, who somehow manages to combine an over-the-top performance with very intricate rhythms which somehow sometimes stutter in an oddly mechanical way. It’s kind of hard to explain really.

Kevin Eldon performed as a spoof poet and was very funny indeed.

We also saw Tori Amos in the Acoustic tent, and Garbage on the Pyramid stage from the comfort our own tent.

The final main act we saw was 2 Many DJs. I was expecting good things, as Nick’s been raving about them since… well, pretty much ever since I first met him, I think. He is a big fan of the way they can combine songs which have no right to be combined, so you never know what’s going to come next. Tragically they were completely rubbish, turning in an utterly bog standard dance set.

We left the Dance tent slightly disappointed, but even with the main acts over there was still entertainment available. We managed to catch a bit more comedy, and something called the “Alien Circus”, which was just a fairly boring dance performance hidden by sci-fi costumes.

We headed for the Lost Vagueness area, and the Chapel of Love and Hate, where we saw a peculiar piece of ballet called Rumpled Foreskin – basically an adaptation of Beauty and the Beast. And then we saw an act that I don’t think I could have prepared myself for – Gobsausage. I think the only way to describe it is a shambolic, pornographic, futuristic punk act. A man in a gimp mask shouted while topless girls spat on crucifixes. I think a lot of the audience didn’t really seem to get it. Mine and Nick’s interpretation was that it was some kind of comment on the kind of shock tactics used by the music industry, but in reality I think we only stuck around because we were far too scared to leave.

When it was over, we headed outside to see what else Lost Vagueness had to offer. Tea & Sympathy: “Tea 50p. Shoulder to cry on is free”. And Sweeney Todd’s, where apparently you could get a shot and a shave. There were some actors singing, although they didn’t seem to have much of an idea about who would be singing what at what time.

We headed to the Stone Circle. Here is a video of some communal bongo-ing in the run-up to sunrise.

Nick was in full hippy mode.

Here is a video showing the full 360°. It was a rather odd experience actually – the whole scene was completely indistinguishable from 1971. In the video you can see and hear Nick using pedal power to play us a song. I don’t know who was responsible for the contraption. Apparently they go around schools with it, to teach kids about renewable energy sources. It was all too bizarre to take in.

Monday 27th June

We staggered back to the tent, got a few hours’ sleep, and then packed up everything. Said goodbye to everybody, got on a bus at about 1pm, and got back home around 6.30pm. I was completely knackered, greasy, muddy and sunburnt. But it was bloody worth it.