Girl in a white dress

Margo's Summer Sunday Picnic
The Boules Court, Hampstead Heath

Remembering Glastonbury

We took off early in the morning, and made it bang on time to the gates of Glastonbury at 8am; already there were queues and traffic jams forming … we parked miles away from the entrance and hiked up hills and down dales absolutely loaded under with tent, camping chairs, airbeds, cooler bag, backpacks - the works. By the time we made it to the front gate, we were already shattered. We stayed shattered (and got more and more shattered) all weekend …

We found a great spot to camp, on a legendary Glastonbury favoured field called Pennards. We knew we’d done the right thing when we said ‘hi’ to our tent neighbours and found out that they’d been to Glastonbury every year for nearly 20 years. Unfortunately we found out an hour later that Tina and Bill and friends had all camped about 500 yards away, closer to the road. After stamping back and forth down the hill, we decided it was just too much effort to re-locate, and that we would just keep in touch from where we were. Famous last words - haha!

Our neighbours raised a HUGE flag with a picture of a pink cow on it. Our tiddly little flag had my leopard print scarf and a sheaf of Red Indian feathers on it. Thank god for the Pink Cow; so many times that we would never have found our way back to our tent, without the smiling Moo Moo Thing flapping at us!

As we set up camp, slowly the field around us transformed into thousands upon thousands of tents, camped right on top of each other. People stuck paper messages on the grass where they wanted friends to camp, and we ended up with a lovely grass space in front of us which stayed open all festival and which was really nice in terms of a little “front porch”. In other places people had rows of passersby just tramping through their sites, over their guy ropes, even onto their tents; eventually after 5 days of this the grass was just carved away into dust. It became a physical chore just getting back to your tent through the campsite.

The festival was so organised though, in a lovely organic sort of way. They left piles of woodchips for us to collect for fires, they delivered milk and water every day in funny little tractor-drawn cow-painted carts. The only challenges, really, were the showers and the loos. In all my life, travelling right across Africa, I have never seen toilets so basic, so terrible, and - after 5 gruesome days - so stinky, smelly, horrible and horrific. Eventually, we just gave up, tried not to eat, and used some very basic ablutions of our own in our own tent (“wee in a bottle” would be about right!)

On our first two days, we set off exploring the Festival farm, and probably did the worst things we possibly could. We walked for miles, trying to cover everything and see it all. Mile after mile of quaint village camps, market stalls, stages, bars, pubs, Info spots, craft workshops, massage tents, fortune-tellers, restaurants, stone circles, sleeping dragons, hillsides, campsites, friends and neighbours, post offices - well, we tried and didn’t even get to see half of it (as we discovered afterwards, reading newspaper articles and saying “What?! We never saw that!?!? Where was THAT then?!) Quite, quite insane.

We also made the fatal mistake of having two rip-roaring fun nights in Shangri La, Rocket Ray’s Jukebox Diner, and the Tranny Disco in Trash City - which left us doomed with weariness and hangovers deluxe.

So by Friday morning when the festival only actually STARTED, we were well finished. Ready to go home, really. I could hardly move a muscle, my legs were so sore. Although our airbed was fabulously comfortable (we just rolled together to the dip in the middle and fell into the deep sleep of dead exhaustion), we were a pair of groaning, achy, middle-aged farts as we woke up each morning. We discovered that we are great campers together - we loved the early morning ritual of a cup of coffee over our tiny gas stove; the brisk stroll tripping over guy ropes as we walked to the loos for the first visit of the day, cheerily greeting fellow campers either waking up or just returning from all-night partying. We loved camping, and we will do it again.

The intensity of the festival though, is overwhelming. There is so much to see and do; so much to explore, eat, buy, experience, listen to, dance to and revel in - it’s hard to absorb.

On Friday, we wearily trudged off to start listening to music, and suddenly the festival gave us yet another dimension. The music! Oh fantastic! Each stage has the most fantastic sound system; everywhere the shows are great, the music stars so massive and famous, your expensive entry ticket (£150 for 5 days camping and 3 days music) became cheap at the price …

We saw rock bands, guitarists, old acts and new, DJs, stand-up artists and cabaret. We saw legendary musicians of old, including one of my heroes - Sinead O’Connor, and others we’ve never even heard of - The Gossip, The Editors, the Pigeon Detectives, the Raconteurs, the Zutons. We saw it all … and we still didn’t see them all. There were over 1,200 music acts on show over the 3 days. Twelve hundred. One thousand, two hundred shows. It beggars belief, doesn’t it?

On Friday we saw Fun Lovin' Criminals and the greatest living blues guitarist of our time - Buddy Guy. Absolutely magnificent. Friday was the day it rained, and I actually got to use my wellies. For those of you in the know, the Glastonbury Festival has been plagued over the past few years by rain, floods and above all mountains of mud. So wellies are important, but we got lucky. Only one day of rain and the rest was hot, dusty, sunny and wonderfully summery! Thank heavens, because that one day of shuffling through the mud and rain in wellies and sweaty oilskins was almost too much to bear.

On Saturday, exhausted, we did what everyone else was doing, we carried our camping chairs over to the wide green fields of the main stage and planted ourselves there for the day. The stage is shaped like a Pyramid, with a light shining out the top at night, and it mirrors the shape of the beautiful, magical, mystical Tor - far away in the distance. A glorious sight.

To see the great band Crowded House playing live was the fulfilment of yet another dream for me, and as we all sang along (with tears in our eyes) to “Everywhere you go, you always Take the Weather with You”, the clouds parted and the most beautiful blue skies came out, and stayed with us all weekend.

Around that time, I also managed the acrobatic trick of dropping my mobile phone into my pint of cider, effectively cutting us off from all communication with friends, neighbours and The Outside World. It wasn’t too bad, because a few mates bumped into us - karma - but Tina and Bill - camped so close and yet so far - we never did manage to find their tent again! Lost in the morass of blue tents and multi-coloured people, sadly …

Guy and I stopped in at the Jazz World Stage and saw one of the most heart-wrenchingly beautiful shows of the entire festival. A small group of British musicians formed a band called “The Imagined Village” and they have reinvented some of the very old country songs of hundreds of years ago, sung along with new technology. They sang “Are you going to Scarborough Fair - parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme” and I held Guy’s hand and cried because it was so haunting and magical.

Later that night we went to watch Massive Attack, one of my best bands of all time. Their laser light show was huge, overwhelming and dreamlike, and the sound system was fantastic. We danced like demons on bone-weary feet, and then went to play until 3am in the hysterically funny Silent Disco (everyone wears headphones to hear the music and sing along like silly things. If you took your headphones off, all you could hear was the silence - and silly people singing along to the music in their heads).

By 4am we were up at the Stone Circle, where the huge statue of a wooden Dragon lunged up to meet the sky and drummers beat the rhythm around the early morning fires, greeting a pagan dawn, looking down on 177,000 people spread across the Festival.

On Sunday we sang along with Neil Diamond to “Sweet Caroline” and then headed on down to the markets to discover a tent called “Chai Wallah’s”. It was yet another small personal revelation I had, and loved, about Glastonbury. Here a loose collaborative of young and talented musicians had teamed up as “One Taste” and each sang, one after the other as we in the audience sat and rested, drank tea, sang along or slept on small platforms allocated alongside for the exhausted, weary, over-drugged or undernourished festival party animals around us.

But by Sunday night the mood of the Festival seemed to turn a little; it developed a dangerous edge of anarchy, fuelled I’m sure by weariness and a surfeit of overwhelming emotions. We watched Groove Armada and it was great, but I was simply too tired to enjoy it anymore. Guy and I bitched and moaned at each other, at passersby and at everything. Around us, people started huge fires, burning everything in their paths including chairs, clothing and alcohol. The field was mired in mess by the time we left.

I could not move from our bed that night but Guy was drawn by the drumming through the night from the Stone Circle, and at some point he slipped away to go up there and sit, saying his goodbye to the Festival. As you do at Glastonbury, he met a fellow New Zealander and they chatted on until the dawn came, and the “Last Hurrah” cheered across the fields.

At times over the weekend, people were so filled with joy you would hear a cheer start at one corner of the Festival and travel around the grounds like a Mexican wave of sound, everyone taking up the roar, for whatever reason it may have started, you never knew, but sheer ebullience carried it on.

I showered twice that weekend, once at the open-air Greenfields showers and once I got lucky - a friend of mine working in the Medical tent gave me access to a staff shower. Other than that, we didn’t mind feeling grubby - too engrossed to notice. We learned to sleep with our ears stuffed up with plugs - it became the only way to block out the noise of the all-night music and our neighbours partying inches away in their own little tents. But the discomforts meant nothing (well, except for the loos perhaps!); they simply fell away in the enchantment of the entire experience.

So many years ago, when I first came here, I sang along to the words of the Waterboys - “there is a green hill faraway, I’m going back there one fine day”. I never did expect, in my wildest dreams, to come this way again, in such wild and wonderful fashion.

We packed and left quietly at 5am on Monday morning; only a few had left before us, but it was the right thing to do. And we managed to stop in the nearby village of Glastonbury (the real Glastonbury - the festival itself takes places closer to Pilton Village) where we trudged slowly up to the legendary ruined tower of St Michael’s Church. There we met another pilgrim; a girl who had worked the festival for the BBC, and was leaving as we were, by saying goodbye from the oldest part of the countryside - that powerful symbol of myth and magic; the enchanted place where it all began and ended - from Glastonbury Tor.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvoCT5I6xd4ww.youtube.com/watch?v=MvoCT5I6xd4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnH7nF_zvoA&feature=related