I dreamed of you on my farm
It's time for the annual mega-post reporting on Glastonbury. If you dislike words (or dislike an excess of words) then try the nearly word-free version on Flickr instead.
Also, a disclaimer: my legs are still not working properly. I was aware before I set off that this year was going to be quite a minimalist festival for me. Usually we rack up miles and miles each day walking backwards and forwards across the site, and I just wasn't going to be up to that. In addition, the weather was unfriendly and it was one of those years when everyone finds it difficult to get around; walking in thick, sucking mud is surprisingly hard work. Accordingly, there is much less serendipitous weirdness below than in other years.
Wednesday
By the time we got round to thinking about bounding out of bed on Wednesday morning, the festival was already requesting that anyone who hadn't yet set off stay at home. Heavy rain in the run up to the festival had made getting the cars and campervans on site into a muddy mess, and the traffic jams of those waiting to make the attempt had already reached epic proportions. Please, they said, stay at home for now.
So we had a lazy morning pottering about and taking several hours to do what we would have otherwise polished off in twenty minutes. And still the festival (and the police) politely requested us to stay at home. So we tuned to the festival's radio station (Worthy FM, well out of FM range of West London but available on the internet) and pottered about some more. Eventually we came up with a new plan: we could have a cheap Travelodge room in actual-Glastonbury, so figured we'd potter down there, have a nice look around actual-Glastonbury, go for dinner in the excellent pub (weirdly called the Who'd A Thought It?). We'd plan a pleasant evening for ourselves, and be well placed to zip over on Thursday morning.
Which kinda worked. Unfortunately, we still got caught in the festival traffic, and spent a couple of hours not going anywhere on the A37 for a bit before bailing off down a back route and making our way to actual-Glastonbury. There were a lot of horror stories about people being stuck on cars and coaches for a ludicrous amount of time, we had it pretty easy. At one point ChrisC got out of the car to scout ahead - maps showed a white road, but for local traffic reasons smaller roads are often closed. His impression was that part of the problem for our (local) traffic issue was coaches stopping to let people off to pop into the pub toilets.
(Side note: actual-Glastonbury is a town in Somerset, population 8,932 at the last census. Festival-Glastonbury is 6 or 7 miles away on a farm, peak population not advertised but somewhere in the 200,000 region.)
By the time we made it to our hotel, it was too late in the day for the stroll up the Tor that we'd considered. Also, on inspection, the Tor revealed itself to be a very much steeper hill than I'd remembered, and probably beyond my walking capacity at present. Instead we walked down to the pub, had dinner, and went off to bed.
Thursday
Tankus the Henge, The Smyths, Mr B. The Gentleman Rhymer
Fearing traffic horror again, we were up and doing relatively early. As it was, we cruised in to festival-Glastonbury from actual-Glastonbury without seeing a queue, took our designated turning, and parked up. I applied in May to use the disabled facilities at the festival, but was turned down (they keep the disabled facilities strictly for those with permanent conditions). However, I was offered use of the disabled car park, which makes for a much shorter hike in to the festival. Useful for me, not to mention useful for ChrisC who had bravely volunteered to do multiple journeys in from the car so I didn't have to carry anything.
I was being vaguely paranoid about tripping over a guy rope in the night (something I do every year) so we'd planned to camp a long way out in one of the near-deserted fields. Except no one else had been apprised of our plan, and people who didn't want to camp in flooded fields elsewhere (or just couldn't face carrying their stuff any further) were pitching tents all over our deserted field. We put up our tent, chatting to two women of around our age as they put theirs up nextdoor. Although our field continued to fill up, the gaps between the tents were reasonable (or, if you're used to nice polite campsites, stupidly small but not actually non-existent) and the navigation from tent to path wasn't too terrifying.
ChrisC went off to do the second run to the car while I lay around in the tent like a lazy arse. He was gone quite a while, and returned with piles of baggage and tales of hilarious misdirection from confused stewards - the short road to the car park was closed to pedestrians, and the route he was directed to take ended in an abrupt dead end. The going from the site to the car park was best described as "soft" (or accurately described as "clarty") and once he returned he also flopped down to lie around like a lazy arse.
Every year when I arrive at festival-Glastonbury I complain that they've moved stuff around and I'm all disorientated. Usually the problem is actually my appalling sense of direction; in this case they actually had moved a whole bunch of stuff at our end of the festival around. I blame this for the fact that for the entire weekend I never quite got my bearings sorted out. We meandered slowly through the festival to the Greenfields, to the Tiny Tea Tent where (as is now firmly traditional) we were meeting satyrica for a cup of tea. ChrisC detoured via a nearby stall to pick up a plate of bread and butter pudding, ate it and promptly lapsed into some form of carb coma (though my notes from last year suggest that him having a little nap at this point is also becoming traditional).
We headed to the Greenpeace stage (this year built as a rocket-launching site) to watch festival hardy perennials Tankus the Henge. Despite knowing that Satyrica was in the audience (he'd headed straight there, we'd done a mild detour) and it being quite a small stage, I completely failed to find him again. On the plus side, I did find a small troupe of dancing lollipop ladies (complete with signs).
The cafés of Glastonbury are very open affairs, meaning ChrisC could bring his elsewhere-purchased pudding into the Tiny Tea Tent. And then, while I paused to write some postcards to my family, he could duck into the nearby Fluffy Rock Cafe and avail himself of their seats and live music while waiting, without having to faff about with bar queues. This is so much the way the world works at the festival that is seems quite normal, despite being the total opposite of how cafes work in the country the rest of the time.
We trundled through Theatre & Circus, but the place wasn't really awake yet - just a couple of marching bands (one marching, one tied to a stage) and a game of Zorb football going on.
We set off to go to the Bowie singalong on the Pyramid field - at least, I thought we did that, but general festival lag had already set in and ChrisC had lost track of time, meaning that he (in charge of our navigation) wasn't really aiming for there. We ended up instead at the Cider Bus, where we sent our traditional annual greetings to Carolyn (a former festival regular who now lives in Hong Kong - for the last however many years we have kept up our former 9pm meeting with Carolyn and sent her a picture), and then swung by Williams Green to hear a bit of a Smiths covers band.
When planning for Glastonbury, ChrisC had persistently said that we'd never make it to the Park. The Park is almost a little sub-festival within the festival, but it's up a pretty steep hill. But when we passed it wasn't busy or crowded, so we thought we'd give it a whirl: I made it all the way up to the top of the Park, and out through the back to the steeply-sloping view-over-the-entire-festival hill behind. Admittedly I had to choose my route up carefully (and my route back down even more carefully) but we sat and watched the sun set over festival before ambling back down to seek out tea.
Thursday seems to be becoming a day of traditions; we had our traditional festival opener of Mr B The Gentleman Rhymer in Croissant Neuf, complete with bonus guest appearance from Prof. Elemental (yup, on the same stage, and everything).
Before heading off to Glastonbury, I'd duct-taped fairy lights to both my crutches following a suggestion from ChrisC. It was intended to be attention-grabbing in the most literal sense: I'm here, I'm on crutches, please don't walk into me. As a totally unexpected side effect, it also lit up the floor, enabling me to see exactly where I was walking. Another unexpected side effect was that random slightly drunken people would stop to talk to me. So having paused to chat to Kevin, a friend I bumped into on the way out of Croissant Neuf, and then paused to chat to two extremely rambling blokes about skiing accidents and disabilities, it took us a good hour to get back to the tent.
Friday
James, Blossoms, Christine & the Queens, Beans on Toast, Billy Bragg, a couple of not-quite-sure people on Leftfield, Two Door Cinema Club, Editors, Explosions in the Sky, Bastille, Sigur Ros.
I woke on Friday to hear people in the next tent talking about the news. Unfortunately, the guy doing most of the talking had quite possibly been up all night and kept getting "remain" and "leave" confused; I managed to get enough signal to check the news. As people around us woke up, more and more tents started talking about it. It's the first time I've ever heard politics discussed quite so heavily around the campsites. As we walked down from the tent, one of the caravans used by the campsite stewards had put up a blackboard which reported: Leave 51.8%, Remain 48.2%, Turnout 72%, France still 22 miles away.
In recent years, the first band on the Other stage has been a secret (or, at times, "secret") big-name band. This year it was the not-secret-at-all James. At eleven o'clock - showtime - the Other stage arena was still fenced off and armies of people and trucks were doing mysterious things with woodchip. We presume they were making sure that the mud in front of the stage was merely muddy, and not Roskilde-levels of dangerous before they let people in. Eventually Michael Eavis himself appeared on stage (how to get a restless crowd on side...) to announce that James would be along in a minute. And they were, and they played the hits I wanted to hear (Tomorrow, Sometimes, Laid...) and missed out the ones I didn't (Sit Down, She's a Star).
Normally, at this point, I'd have seen James offstage and shot off somewhere else. But shooting was less of an option. I'd got a camping chair for the first time (surely an admission of being old at a festival...) and I stayed put for the next couple of bands. If you've not encountered them, I highly recommend Christine & the Queens - though they're as much about the stage show as they are about the songs. Think French electronica and Michael Jackson-esque dancing.
Having lunched, I decided to brave the walk round to the Pyramid for Two Door Cinema Club, but the weather decided it was time for a lovely downpour. Since we were passing the Leftfield (clue: the Leftfield is a tent, not a field) and could just about make out the fuzzy outline of Beans on Toast, we dived for cover. Beans on Toast was singing the hopeful Afternoons in the Sunshine, a song he declared he'd planned to sing whatever the outcome of the referendum, on the grounds that either way approximately half the country would be upset. And we got a bit of Billy Bragg, and a daily dose of politics, and a couple of other people whose names I didn't catch, and then we wended back out into the drizzle to catch the end of Two Door Cinema Club.
Wary of wearing myself out before I'd really started, I fitted in a little afternoon laze, then the plan was to go and hang out at the (conveniently-close-to-the-tent) John Peel stage all evening. Sadly, what I hadn't really factored in is that sitting still in a camping chair and watching bands, in the evening, is bloody cold. So instead I shuttled gently back and forth between the Other stage and John Peel, while ChrisC occasionally sprinted off for more energetic activity.
We'd been taking bets on how many bands would refer to the referendum - in the end, actually not very many (Leftfield excepted). James mentioned it before launching into Tomorrow. Bastille settled for switching the lyrics of Pompeii around: And the pound came tumbling down, on this weekend that we love.... Most people seemed to have taken a collective decision to put it all off till later: as a group passed me in John Peel, I overheard one say "No, no, no. Remember! No Brexit chat till Wednesday".
Saturday
Palace, [Inheaven], Anna Meredith, Odissee & Good Company, Hurts, Madness, John Grant, Chvrches, Mercury Rev, Adele
On Saturday morning I was woken up by that noise. That heavy, constant drumming noise that means it is absolutely chucking it down. I despaired gently, and went back to sleep. When I got up, it was pleasant enough weather but even on our campsite (at the top of a hill) there was standing water everywhere. The mud became commensurately muddier.
We made it down the hill to John Peel to catch the end of Palace, then decided to try moving as quickly as possible (with bad mud and bad legs, that was not very quickly) to try to make it to the Goan Fish Curry stall in West Holts before they ran out of breakfast kedgeree. Despite ChrisC sprinting(ish) on ahead, they'd sold up and moved on to lunch products. I arrived somewhat later, having paused to photograph the Reason Roadblock - a small truck which had kidnapped some serious electronics and some DJs from the Babylon Uprising soundsystem, acquired some carnival dancers from somewhere, and was cheerfully rolling slowly through the mud throwing out dub in all directions.
We didn't really have much of a plan, so we sat on a bench in West Holts, talking to passersby and listening to whatever happened to be onstage. Eventually, I decided that there were no bands urgently claiming my attention and I hadn't made it to the Greenfields yet. So I headed off for a slow potter in that direction, and ChrisC went off to do his own thing.
Sadly the Greenfields - which I'd hoped would be a little less trampled - were even muddier than the rest of the site. Or, rather, differently muddy. There are lots of kinds of mud (thin and runny, thick and sticky, and many stages between. Trust me.) The Greenfields mud was deep, and sticky, and ridiculously difficult to walk through. I went slowly through the earth and water gardens, chalked my name on a blackboard to book a shiatsu session, got as fair as the air garden (large wooden sculpture, yoga class, meditation session) and decided that the walking was too much work. I paused to get a drink, fumbled, and dropped one of my crutches into the mud. Which made me jump, and my bag sprang open awkwardly - leaving me trying to catch it before it too went in the mud. Fortunately, some very nice passersby picked up my crutch for me, and cleaned it and me off with wet wipes, and all was well. I gave up on my wander and went back to wait for my shiatsu person. As usual, I came out much taller, and strode off back to the Other stage to meet ChrisC.
The Other stage is surrounded by colourful silk flags of different designs. We'd chosen one distinctive design and agreed to meet under it while Hurts were on. I walked towards the flagpole, increasingly sure that ChrisC wasn't there even though I was rather late. I reached it, and got my phone out to check for a message. Instead, a blonde woman (rocking the festival chic look way better than I do) popped up behind me and said "he's over here...".
ChrisC had decided to wait on a bench a short distance away. When he saw me walking across the field, he waved. When I didn't respond, the person sitting next to him waved too. Eventually, the whole bench was waving (beautifully synchronised to Hurts, apparently) while I plodded on oblivious.
We headed up to Madness afterwards, aiming for the back of the field but it was absolutely rammed. I ended up a long way back in the just-chilling-out-and-chatting back ranks of the audience, which always makes for a less fun gig (for me) but even so Madness did seem a bit as if they were phoning it in. However, they did join the long line of Bowie tributes by covering Kooks, which was lovely. Above them on the Pyramid Stage was a Joe Rush sculpture shaped like the Aladdin Sane lightning flash (he'd done another for the Other Stage which referenced Ace of Spades, for Lemmy, which I thought was way better).
We slogged our way through the crowds and along the 'high route' to John Peel for John Grant. I like the John Grant album I own, which is mostly rather sedate and acoustic, and wasn't quite prepared for the funky direction he's gone in. The show was amazing and the crowd enthusiastic, though, despite John Grant losing his voice badly towards the end.
We'd been carrying around our giant brolly all day, because the forecast had been dire. The rain never showed up. In fact, the BBC forecast had been persistently wrong (and very prone to short-notice changes) for the previous few days, in both directions. In the end we gave up on it and started just loading Rain Today instead. Anyway, we dropped off the brolly and collected warmer clothes for the evening, and then wandered down through the "Saxon Market", a new area which was fitted out with various benches, and a little long boat in which a fire was lit at night. We swung by Chvrches starting, then began the arduous hike up the Park.
I arrived out of breath and knackered. Then I realised ChrisC was out of breath and knackered, too. Fighting uphill in the mud was hard work. He got himself down towards the front, I sat sedately at the back in my camping chair. And Mercury Rev came on stage and were awesome. I've not really kept up with them, and they did a lot of songs from albums I don't know. But they finished with Goddess on a Highway, Opus 40 and Dark Is Rising, all works of shimmery genius under the flaming pillars that flank the Park stage.
I was tempted to stick around for the Philip Glass Heroes symphony which was appearing as a late-night special on the Park, but it was too cold for people who weren't bouncing up and down (or drunker than me) so we lazily wandered back to bed via the end of Adele's headline set. (I stand by my claim that Adele has the most amazing voice, and the effortlessness with which she sings while moving about the stage is incredible. I'm just not that down with the songs she sings.)
Sunday
She Drew The Gun, Tired Lion, [Matt Corby], Mystery Jets, Bat for Lashes, Jeff Lynn's ELO, Fishermans Friends, [Bootleg Beatles], PJ Harvey, Jake Bugg.
It had always been our plan to leave on Sunday evening, so we packed up the tent on Sunday morning - aided by ChrisC's colleague Natasha, who'd come by to say hi and very kindly stopped to assist. With her help, we just about made it down to John Peel in time to see She Drew The Gun (winners of this year's festival's Emerging Talent Competition). Recorded, they're quite soft and gentle; live, they're much gutsier and I enjoyed them a lot. I stuck around for Tired Lion, who are from Australia and are basically rocking out like it's 1994.
The BBC forecast was warning that there was going to be a downpour at 5 o'clock, but Rain Today was showing the most enormous wodge of rain heading our way, so we decided that sitting down in a tent with a roof was quite nice, thanks, and we'd stay there. I'm embarrassed to admit I actually dozed through Matt Corby, but woke up for Mystery Jets. As far as I'm concerned, they had one album about ten years ago, and haven't been heard of since. It turns out they've had another five albums, can pack out the John Peel tent with people singing along, and do a storming set without playing a single song I know. Who knew?
Disappointingly, there was a steward changeover, and new steward was not willing (like the previous one) to overlook the 'no chairs in the tent' rule so long as I sat against the back wall. Still, ChrisC's friend Xian had finally managed to end up in the same place as us, so I was happy to stand up and chat to him for a while. I popped out to go to the toilet during the band changeover, but while I was out the tent filled up for the next band and, with crutches, I couldn't manage to squeeze eel-like back to my place. So I stood outside in the rain feeling a bit pathetic. Another steward kindly let me into the entrance way to the disabled viewing platform (as noted previously, I wasn't qualified to use the platform) so I was at least out of the rain.
Eventually, ChrisC wormed his way through the crowd to me and we decided that, although neither of us really likes getting rained on, neither of us really likes Bat for Lashes either. (I don't know why. On paper I feel I should.) So we braved the rain, and headed down to the Pyramid for ELO. Sun is shinin' in the sky, there ain't a cloud in sight they sang, beneath lowering grey skies of drizzle. Yeah, right, Jeff Lynn is worse than the BBC when it comes to weather.
After a rather disappointing set from Fishermans Friends, we sloped off to see if any of the theatre fields were still awake. They weren't, really, and never actually seemed to quite have got going in the mud. However, as we stood there a small horde of glittery sea creatures (including a rather woolly Great Old One) came dancing by, heralding the arrival of a large mechanical turtle. The turtle should have been powered by a man peddling, but in the mud it also required a number of stewards getting their shoulders behind it. Atop the shell was a leprechaun at a set of decks - as it passed us, it was playing Dizzee Rascal's Bonkers at full volume.
It was still gloomy and drizzling, so we tucked ourselves into the Tiny Tea Tent again to have a little sit down and some restorative tea. I'd pulled a fiver out of the mud earlier in the day, and had been looking for something useful to do with it, so put it in the Tiny Tea Tent's collection to help refugees in Calais.
PJ Harvey was, by the way, bloody marvellous and if you live in an iPlayerable region you should definitely get on it. Definitely worth standing in drizzle and mud for: her band are amazing, she is dramatic and compelling on stage (and plays the sax!) Her set was made up largely from recent albums, so not the most cheerful songs, but I loved it. Without comment, mid-set, she read John Donne's No Man Is An Island, which in the circs sounded very like her comment on the vote to leave the EU. I'd have happily had PJ Harvey as a headliner, but she was finished by about early evening so we had time to pull up a bench on one of the shopping streets, at a suitable distance to watch Coldplay's fireworks without having to hear the band. Then we strolled up to catch a bit of Jake Bugg, him being on the stage nearest our exit.
Y'see, I was quite worried. They'd had to tow some vehicles on to the site. And since then, it had rained more. Getting the vehicles off site was going to be a nightmare. I was quite keen to be out early, before the real carnage started. When we got to our little car park, there were several members of Wessex 4x4 Rescue, who'd voluntarily given up their nights to come and drag people out of mud. Put your towing eye in, one of them advised us. I didn't think we had one. You will have, he said.
Of course we do. In the boot, with the spare tyre. Under all the luggage. So there was some ferreting, and some fitting, and I sat in the car ready to drive while ChrisC rushed around helping push people out of mud and negotiating our turn to have a go at getting out, and the best route to take to avoid mud and/or stuck cars. In the end, we would have made it out (with him pushing) without needing a tow but for a tiny misjudgement of route which meant we had to mount a small, muddy slope before we got to hardstanding. A nice Wessex chap dragged us the 3 or 4 yards necessary, and we were off. I don't know what things were like in the other car parks, but cars were reported as leaving in a much more timely manner than I'd expected.
And that's that, for another year. I intend to do a separate post about food. And I intend to get tickets and have a much more reportable festival next year ;)
Also, a disclaimer: my legs are still not working properly. I was aware before I set off that this year was going to be quite a minimalist festival for me. Usually we rack up miles and miles each day walking backwards and forwards across the site, and I just wasn't going to be up to that. In addition, the weather was unfriendly and it was one of those years when everyone finds it difficult to get around; walking in thick, sucking mud is surprisingly hard work. Accordingly, there is much less serendipitous weirdness below than in other years.
Wednesday
By the time we got round to thinking about bounding out of bed on Wednesday morning, the festival was already requesting that anyone who hadn't yet set off stay at home. Heavy rain in the run up to the festival had made getting the cars and campervans on site into a muddy mess, and the traffic jams of those waiting to make the attempt had already reached epic proportions. Please, they said, stay at home for now.
So we had a lazy morning pottering about and taking several hours to do what we would have otherwise polished off in twenty minutes. And still the festival (and the police) politely requested us to stay at home. So we tuned to the festival's radio station (Worthy FM, well out of FM range of West London but available on the internet) and pottered about some more. Eventually we came up with a new plan: we could have a cheap Travelodge room in actual-Glastonbury, so figured we'd potter down there, have a nice look around actual-Glastonbury, go for dinner in the excellent pub (weirdly called the Who'd A Thought It?). We'd plan a pleasant evening for ourselves, and be well placed to zip over on Thursday morning.
Which kinda worked. Unfortunately, we still got caught in the festival traffic, and spent a couple of hours not going anywhere on the A37 for a bit before bailing off down a back route and making our way to actual-Glastonbury. There were a lot of horror stories about people being stuck on cars and coaches for a ludicrous amount of time, we had it pretty easy. At one point ChrisC got out of the car to scout ahead - maps showed a white road, but for local traffic reasons smaller roads are often closed. His impression was that part of the problem for our (local) traffic issue was coaches stopping to let people off to pop into the pub toilets.
(Side note: actual-Glastonbury is a town in Somerset, population 8,932 at the last census. Festival-Glastonbury is 6 or 7 miles away on a farm, peak population not advertised but somewhere in the 200,000 region.)
By the time we made it to our hotel, it was too late in the day for the stroll up the Tor that we'd considered. Also, on inspection, the Tor revealed itself to be a very much steeper hill than I'd remembered, and probably beyond my walking capacity at present. Instead we walked down to the pub, had dinner, and went off to bed.
Thursday
Tankus the Henge, The Smyths, Mr B. The Gentleman Rhymer
Fearing traffic horror again, we were up and doing relatively early. As it was, we cruised in to festival-Glastonbury from actual-Glastonbury without seeing a queue, took our designated turning, and parked up. I applied in May to use the disabled facilities at the festival, but was turned down (they keep the disabled facilities strictly for those with permanent conditions). However, I was offered use of the disabled car park, which makes for a much shorter hike in to the festival. Useful for me, not to mention useful for ChrisC who had bravely volunteered to do multiple journeys in from the car so I didn't have to carry anything.
I was being vaguely paranoid about tripping over a guy rope in the night (something I do every year) so we'd planned to camp a long way out in one of the near-deserted fields. Except no one else had been apprised of our plan, and people who didn't want to camp in flooded fields elsewhere (or just couldn't face carrying their stuff any further) were pitching tents all over our deserted field. We put up our tent, chatting to two women of around our age as they put theirs up nextdoor. Although our field continued to fill up, the gaps between the tents were reasonable (or, if you're used to nice polite campsites, stupidly small but not actually non-existent) and the navigation from tent to path wasn't too terrifying.
ChrisC went off to do the second run to the car while I lay around in the tent like a lazy arse. He was gone quite a while, and returned with piles of baggage and tales of hilarious misdirection from confused stewards - the short road to the car park was closed to pedestrians, and the route he was directed to take ended in an abrupt dead end. The going from the site to the car park was best described as "soft" (or accurately described as "clarty") and once he returned he also flopped down to lie around like a lazy arse.
Every year when I arrive at festival-Glastonbury I complain that they've moved stuff around and I'm all disorientated. Usually the problem is actually my appalling sense of direction; in this case they actually had moved a whole bunch of stuff at our end of the festival around. I blame this for the fact that for the entire weekend I never quite got my bearings sorted out. We meandered slowly through the festival to the Greenfields, to the Tiny Tea Tent where (as is now firmly traditional) we were meeting satyrica for a cup of tea. ChrisC detoured via a nearby stall to pick up a plate of bread and butter pudding, ate it and promptly lapsed into some form of carb coma (though my notes from last year suggest that him having a little nap at this point is also becoming traditional).
We headed to the Greenpeace stage (this year built as a rocket-launching site) to watch festival hardy perennials Tankus the Henge. Despite knowing that Satyrica was in the audience (he'd headed straight there, we'd done a mild detour) and it being quite a small stage, I completely failed to find him again. On the plus side, I did find a small troupe of dancing lollipop ladies (complete with signs).
The cafés of Glastonbury are very open affairs, meaning ChrisC could bring his elsewhere-purchased pudding into the Tiny Tea Tent. And then, while I paused to write some postcards to my family, he could duck into the nearby Fluffy Rock Cafe and avail himself of their seats and live music while waiting, without having to faff about with bar queues. This is so much the way the world works at the festival that is seems quite normal, despite being the total opposite of how cafes work in the country the rest of the time.
We trundled through Theatre & Circus, but the place wasn't really awake yet - just a couple of marching bands (one marching, one tied to a stage) and a game of Zorb football going on.
We set off to go to the Bowie singalong on the Pyramid field - at least, I thought we did that, but general festival lag had already set in and ChrisC had lost track of time, meaning that he (in charge of our navigation) wasn't really aiming for there. We ended up instead at the Cider Bus, where we sent our traditional annual greetings to Carolyn (a former festival regular who now lives in Hong Kong - for the last however many years we have kept up our former 9pm meeting with Carolyn and sent her a picture), and then swung by Williams Green to hear a bit of a Smiths covers band.
When planning for Glastonbury, ChrisC had persistently said that we'd never make it to the Park. The Park is almost a little sub-festival within the festival, but it's up a pretty steep hill. But when we passed it wasn't busy or crowded, so we thought we'd give it a whirl: I made it all the way up to the top of the Park, and out through the back to the steeply-sloping view-over-the-entire-festival hill behind. Admittedly I had to choose my route up carefully (and my route back down even more carefully) but we sat and watched the sun set over festival before ambling back down to seek out tea.
Thursday seems to be becoming a day of traditions; we had our traditional festival opener of Mr B The Gentleman Rhymer in Croissant Neuf, complete with bonus guest appearance from Prof. Elemental (yup, on the same stage, and everything).
Before heading off to Glastonbury, I'd duct-taped fairy lights to both my crutches following a suggestion from ChrisC. It was intended to be attention-grabbing in the most literal sense: I'm here, I'm on crutches, please don't walk into me. As a totally unexpected side effect, it also lit up the floor, enabling me to see exactly where I was walking. Another unexpected side effect was that random slightly drunken people would stop to talk to me. So having paused to chat to Kevin, a friend I bumped into on the way out of Croissant Neuf, and then paused to chat to two extremely rambling blokes about skiing accidents and disabilities, it took us a good hour to get back to the tent.
Friday
James, Blossoms, Christine & the Queens, Beans on Toast, Billy Bragg, a couple of not-quite-sure people on Leftfield, Two Door Cinema Club, Editors, Explosions in the Sky, Bastille, Sigur Ros.
I woke on Friday to hear people in the next tent talking about the news. Unfortunately, the guy doing most of the talking had quite possibly been up all night and kept getting "remain" and "leave" confused; I managed to get enough signal to check the news. As people around us woke up, more and more tents started talking about it. It's the first time I've ever heard politics discussed quite so heavily around the campsites. As we walked down from the tent, one of the caravans used by the campsite stewards had put up a blackboard which reported: Leave 51.8%, Remain 48.2%, Turnout 72%, France still 22 miles away.
In recent years, the first band on the Other stage has been a secret (or, at times, "secret") big-name band. This year it was the not-secret-at-all James. At eleven o'clock - showtime - the Other stage arena was still fenced off and armies of people and trucks were doing mysterious things with woodchip. We presume they were making sure that the mud in front of the stage was merely muddy, and not Roskilde-levels of dangerous before they let people in. Eventually Michael Eavis himself appeared on stage (how to get a restless crowd on side...) to announce that James would be along in a minute. And they were, and they played the hits I wanted to hear (Tomorrow, Sometimes, Laid...) and missed out the ones I didn't (Sit Down, She's a Star).
Normally, at this point, I'd have seen James offstage and shot off somewhere else. But shooting was less of an option. I'd got a camping chair for the first time (surely an admission of being old at a festival...) and I stayed put for the next couple of bands. If you've not encountered them, I highly recommend Christine & the Queens - though they're as much about the stage show as they are about the songs. Think French electronica and Michael Jackson-esque dancing.
Having lunched, I decided to brave the walk round to the Pyramid for Two Door Cinema Club, but the weather decided it was time for a lovely downpour. Since we were passing the Leftfield (clue: the Leftfield is a tent, not a field) and could just about make out the fuzzy outline of Beans on Toast, we dived for cover. Beans on Toast was singing the hopeful Afternoons in the Sunshine, a song he declared he'd planned to sing whatever the outcome of the referendum, on the grounds that either way approximately half the country would be upset. And we got a bit of Billy Bragg, and a daily dose of politics, and a couple of other people whose names I didn't catch, and then we wended back out into the drizzle to catch the end of Two Door Cinema Club.
Wary of wearing myself out before I'd really started, I fitted in a little afternoon laze, then the plan was to go and hang out at the (conveniently-close-to-the-tent) John Peel stage all evening. Sadly, what I hadn't really factored in is that sitting still in a camping chair and watching bands, in the evening, is bloody cold. So instead I shuttled gently back and forth between the Other stage and John Peel, while ChrisC occasionally sprinted off for more energetic activity.
We'd been taking bets on how many bands would refer to the referendum - in the end, actually not very many (Leftfield excepted). James mentioned it before launching into Tomorrow. Bastille settled for switching the lyrics of Pompeii around: And the pound came tumbling down, on this weekend that we love.... Most people seemed to have taken a collective decision to put it all off till later: as a group passed me in John Peel, I overheard one say "No, no, no. Remember! No Brexit chat till Wednesday".
Saturday
Palace, [Inheaven], Anna Meredith, Odissee & Good Company, Hurts, Madness, John Grant, Chvrches, Mercury Rev, Adele
On Saturday morning I was woken up by that noise. That heavy, constant drumming noise that means it is absolutely chucking it down. I despaired gently, and went back to sleep. When I got up, it was pleasant enough weather but even on our campsite (at the top of a hill) there was standing water everywhere. The mud became commensurately muddier.
We made it down the hill to John Peel to catch the end of Palace, then decided to try moving as quickly as possible (with bad mud and bad legs, that was not very quickly) to try to make it to the Goan Fish Curry stall in West Holts before they ran out of breakfast kedgeree. Despite ChrisC sprinting(ish) on ahead, they'd sold up and moved on to lunch products. I arrived somewhat later, having paused to photograph the Reason Roadblock - a small truck which had kidnapped some serious electronics and some DJs from the Babylon Uprising soundsystem, acquired some carnival dancers from somewhere, and was cheerfully rolling slowly through the mud throwing out dub in all directions.
We didn't really have much of a plan, so we sat on a bench in West Holts, talking to passersby and listening to whatever happened to be onstage. Eventually, I decided that there were no bands urgently claiming my attention and I hadn't made it to the Greenfields yet. So I headed off for a slow potter in that direction, and ChrisC went off to do his own thing.
Sadly the Greenfields - which I'd hoped would be a little less trampled - were even muddier than the rest of the site. Or, rather, differently muddy. There are lots of kinds of mud (thin and runny, thick and sticky, and many stages between. Trust me.) The Greenfields mud was deep, and sticky, and ridiculously difficult to walk through. I went slowly through the earth and water gardens, chalked my name on a blackboard to book a shiatsu session, got as fair as the air garden (large wooden sculpture, yoga class, meditation session) and decided that the walking was too much work. I paused to get a drink, fumbled, and dropped one of my crutches into the mud. Which made me jump, and my bag sprang open awkwardly - leaving me trying to catch it before it too went in the mud. Fortunately, some very nice passersby picked up my crutch for me, and cleaned it and me off with wet wipes, and all was well. I gave up on my wander and went back to wait for my shiatsu person. As usual, I came out much taller, and strode off back to the Other stage to meet ChrisC.
The Other stage is surrounded by colourful silk flags of different designs. We'd chosen one distinctive design and agreed to meet under it while Hurts were on. I walked towards the flagpole, increasingly sure that ChrisC wasn't there even though I was rather late. I reached it, and got my phone out to check for a message. Instead, a blonde woman (rocking the festival chic look way better than I do) popped up behind me and said "he's over here...".
ChrisC had decided to wait on a bench a short distance away. When he saw me walking across the field, he waved. When I didn't respond, the person sitting next to him waved too. Eventually, the whole bench was waving (beautifully synchronised to Hurts, apparently) while I plodded on oblivious.
We headed up to Madness afterwards, aiming for the back of the field but it was absolutely rammed. I ended up a long way back in the just-chilling-out-and-chatting back ranks of the audience, which always makes for a less fun gig (for me) but even so Madness did seem a bit as if they were phoning it in. However, they did join the long line of Bowie tributes by covering Kooks, which was lovely. Above them on the Pyramid Stage was a Joe Rush sculpture shaped like the Aladdin Sane lightning flash (he'd done another for the Other Stage which referenced Ace of Spades, for Lemmy, which I thought was way better).
We slogged our way through the crowds and along the 'high route' to John Peel for John Grant. I like the John Grant album I own, which is mostly rather sedate and acoustic, and wasn't quite prepared for the funky direction he's gone in. The show was amazing and the crowd enthusiastic, though, despite John Grant losing his voice badly towards the end.
We'd been carrying around our giant brolly all day, because the forecast had been dire. The rain never showed up. In fact, the BBC forecast had been persistently wrong (and very prone to short-notice changes) for the previous few days, in both directions. In the end we gave up on it and started just loading Rain Today instead. Anyway, we dropped off the brolly and collected warmer clothes for the evening, and then wandered down through the "Saxon Market", a new area which was fitted out with various benches, and a little long boat in which a fire was lit at night. We swung by Chvrches starting, then began the arduous hike up the Park.
I arrived out of breath and knackered. Then I realised ChrisC was out of breath and knackered, too. Fighting uphill in the mud was hard work. He got himself down towards the front, I sat sedately at the back in my camping chair. And Mercury Rev came on stage and were awesome. I've not really kept up with them, and they did a lot of songs from albums I don't know. But they finished with Goddess on a Highway, Opus 40 and Dark Is Rising, all works of shimmery genius under the flaming pillars that flank the Park stage.
I was tempted to stick around for the Philip Glass Heroes symphony which was appearing as a late-night special on the Park, but it was too cold for people who weren't bouncing up and down (or drunker than me) so we lazily wandered back to bed via the end of Adele's headline set. (I stand by my claim that Adele has the most amazing voice, and the effortlessness with which she sings while moving about the stage is incredible. I'm just not that down with the songs she sings.)
Sunday
She Drew The Gun, Tired Lion, [Matt Corby], Mystery Jets, Bat for Lashes, Jeff Lynn's ELO, Fishermans Friends, [Bootleg Beatles], PJ Harvey, Jake Bugg.
It had always been our plan to leave on Sunday evening, so we packed up the tent on Sunday morning - aided by ChrisC's colleague Natasha, who'd come by to say hi and very kindly stopped to assist. With her help, we just about made it down to John Peel in time to see She Drew The Gun (winners of this year's festival's Emerging Talent Competition). Recorded, they're quite soft and gentle; live, they're much gutsier and I enjoyed them a lot. I stuck around for Tired Lion, who are from Australia and are basically rocking out like it's 1994.
The BBC forecast was warning that there was going to be a downpour at 5 o'clock, but Rain Today was showing the most enormous wodge of rain heading our way, so we decided that sitting down in a tent with a roof was quite nice, thanks, and we'd stay there. I'm embarrassed to admit I actually dozed through Matt Corby, but woke up for Mystery Jets. As far as I'm concerned, they had one album about ten years ago, and haven't been heard of since. It turns out they've had another five albums, can pack out the John Peel tent with people singing along, and do a storming set without playing a single song I know. Who knew?
Disappointingly, there was a steward changeover, and new steward was not willing (like the previous one) to overlook the 'no chairs in the tent' rule so long as I sat against the back wall. Still, ChrisC's friend Xian had finally managed to end up in the same place as us, so I was happy to stand up and chat to him for a while. I popped out to go to the toilet during the band changeover, but while I was out the tent filled up for the next band and, with crutches, I couldn't manage to squeeze eel-like back to my place. So I stood outside in the rain feeling a bit pathetic. Another steward kindly let me into the entrance way to the disabled viewing platform (as noted previously, I wasn't qualified to use the platform) so I was at least out of the rain.
Eventually, ChrisC wormed his way through the crowd to me and we decided that, although neither of us really likes getting rained on, neither of us really likes Bat for Lashes either. (I don't know why. On paper I feel I should.) So we braved the rain, and headed down to the Pyramid for ELO. Sun is shinin' in the sky, there ain't a cloud in sight they sang, beneath lowering grey skies of drizzle. Yeah, right, Jeff Lynn is worse than the BBC when it comes to weather.
After a rather disappointing set from Fishermans Friends, we sloped off to see if any of the theatre fields were still awake. They weren't, really, and never actually seemed to quite have got going in the mud. However, as we stood there a small horde of glittery sea creatures (including a rather woolly Great Old One) came dancing by, heralding the arrival of a large mechanical turtle. The turtle should have been powered by a man peddling, but in the mud it also required a number of stewards getting their shoulders behind it. Atop the shell was a leprechaun at a set of decks - as it passed us, it was playing Dizzee Rascal's Bonkers at full volume.
It was still gloomy and drizzling, so we tucked ourselves into the Tiny Tea Tent again to have a little sit down and some restorative tea. I'd pulled a fiver out of the mud earlier in the day, and had been looking for something useful to do with it, so put it in the Tiny Tea Tent's collection to help refugees in Calais.
PJ Harvey was, by the way, bloody marvellous and if you live in an iPlayerable region you should definitely get on it. Definitely worth standing in drizzle and mud for: her band are amazing, she is dramatic and compelling on stage (and plays the sax!) Her set was made up largely from recent albums, so not the most cheerful songs, but I loved it. Without comment, mid-set, she read John Donne's No Man Is An Island, which in the circs sounded very like her comment on the vote to leave the EU. I'd have happily had PJ Harvey as a headliner, but she was finished by about early evening so we had time to pull up a bench on one of the shopping streets, at a suitable distance to watch Coldplay's fireworks without having to hear the band. Then we strolled up to catch a bit of Jake Bugg, him being on the stage nearest our exit.
Y'see, I was quite worried. They'd had to tow some vehicles on to the site. And since then, it had rained more. Getting the vehicles off site was going to be a nightmare. I was quite keen to be out early, before the real carnage started. When we got to our little car park, there were several members of Wessex 4x4 Rescue, who'd voluntarily given up their nights to come and drag people out of mud. Put your towing eye in, one of them advised us. I didn't think we had one. You will have, he said.
Of course we do. In the boot, with the spare tyre. Under all the luggage. So there was some ferreting, and some fitting, and I sat in the car ready to drive while ChrisC rushed around helping push people out of mud and negotiating our turn to have a go at getting out, and the best route to take to avoid mud and/or stuck cars. In the end, we would have made it out (with him pushing) without needing a tow but for a tiny misjudgement of route which meant we had to mount a small, muddy slope before we got to hardstanding. A nice Wessex chap dragged us the 3 or 4 yards necessary, and we were off. I don't know what things were like in the other car parks, but cars were reported as leaving in a much more timely manner than I'd expected.
And that's that, for another year. I intend to do a separate post about food. And I intend to get tickets and have a much more reportable festival next year ;)