Glastonbury;The Last Rites

'Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood' Oh Flanders and Swann, how much fun would they have had with the phenomenon that is the 21st century mega music etc festival.

What can I say that hasn't been said by many after this year, and 2005 and all the other mud encrusted years down the line. It didn't ruin it, but FUCK ME SIDEWAYS, how much better is a music/arts/drugs/people/gathering/dance/everything festival when the sun is out. The photo here is proof that the sun did come out. This is it going down, a sunset on Solstice. I will always enjoy watching the sun setting.

I've had a couple of months to let all the memories fade into the kind of haze necessary to be my memories. Sort of confused, sort of tiny soundbites. They are like my dreams in that respect because I rarely remember my dreams in any massive detail. Shame because so few are nightmares of any genuine proportion. One nightmare though is where I'm in a field surrounded by people and everybody is wading through 6 inches of mud. Ah!

There is a human need it seems to say 'I was there' about many events. I've done it myself and am very glad I saw the poll tax riots, big festival stuff. I'm actually glad I heard Babyshambles because now I can categorically state the Pete Docherty is a thoroughly talentless cunt, which I would, with extraordinary venom, point out to him if he were in this room now. I wish now I'd been close enough to mud-chuck the twat off stage. In years to come, I may be happy that I listened to Bjork from a distance having suitably revitalized myself for Fat Boy Slim but disallowed myself from attending thanks to the appropriate 'byerk, byerk' sounds from my beautiful but puking girlfriend. I'm so very glad though that I was there watching the rediculous post-punk/still punk phenomenon that is Iggy Pop. I'm sure I'm not alone on that one.

It's still the big event on the calendar for many furry folk and kids and capitalistic opportunists. But evolution can turn the comely countenance that is bizarre free-form weirdness into the ugly physiognomy I have witnessed in part this time around.

I had plenty of laughs considering what piss miserable weather it was to be living in a tent. I saw a few bands through the usual wall of people taller than me, (which is virtually everybody) but if anybody ever says it's the same as previous decades, they lost the plot very badly in those previous decades and perhaps struggle to know what decade it is now. Sure, many things are the same. But it's all put together in an organised modern and leviathan package which flies in the face of the spontaneity and out of leftfield world which are it's roots.

I feel like a moaning old wanker just complaining that the world isn't what it used to be and desperate for somebody to give me the keys to the TARDIS so I can go back and witness those glory years again. But the thing is, I also know very well that I would find some of that boring as well. It's a sad part of my life that maybe I'm just not the kind of person to have done all the habitual and recreational drug stuff and still have the energy left to enjoy life for what it is on a minute by minute basis. I knew before I went that after an absence of 14 years that it was inevitable that I would compare the old days with the new. I tried not to, but it just kept throwing itself into my path like a suffragette in front of the king's horse. But I suppose that is the curse of any life. None of us get younger and we have no choice but to experience things and then compare them to things we have previously experienced. That is the essence of a life spent with eyes periodically wide open. There are alternatives, I don't think I'd prefer them.