Good Start

After Dan backed Cheeques into an articulated lorry and caused quite an uproar in the already mentally chaotic sludge churned traffic jam getting into the festival, we got stuck in the mud (but at least we were away from the swearing lorry man). Sinister thunder clouds lurched above us and we were hugely late for setting up, we wondered how we'd ever get out of this pickle. Then a kind man with long grey hair and a jazzy waistcoat seemed to take a liking to Cheeques and probably sensed my fretting as I was flapping around trying to figure out how to extract us and our three tonne bus out of this predicament. Before we knew it, the jazzy waistcoat man had arranged for a gleaming yellow tractor to lure us out of the squelching mess that we'd become, and we were towed through knee high mud all the way over to our shitty council stand where we'd be working for the weekend.

Miraculously, we were able to get sporadic clusters of people onto our weird little set up (particularly strange as we were sandwiched between a very unhappy looking woman selling overly happy looking, but half deflated helium balloons, a zoomp-ed up pimped up watch stand and a careers advice tent);

we.just.didn't.fit.in.

The council workers who'd hired us were impeccable in their white branded uniforms, drowning the few cyclists we managed to get involved with clip boards, paperwork and dishing out crappy trademarked merchandise. We keep catching them stealing looks at our scrappy selves, as we launch and wiggle about the place desperately attempting to conjure up some sort of life in this impossibly redundant neck of the woods, and it's likely they were wondering how they ended up hiring us. But fret about this, we did not, and it was soon time to hang up the pedals for the evening and stomp about the festival to see what we could find.

We unexpectedly ended the night thrashing around in the roughest mosh pit ever at The Buzzcocks. I've never experienced having to take recovery rests before, but every other song I was mortified to find myself standing aside to assess the level of injuries, usually to my head but at one point my jugular took quite a beating. 'ard as anything, this crowd was. Stocky fourty-summit skin heads cracking into one another, with great huge smiles on their faces and adhering firmly to the mosh pit etiquette - soon as someone takes a tumble, all make it their utmost priority to extract the fallen from their stamped on ground so they could once again return to the leaping and launching about. This, of course, happened to me on a great deal of occasions, and I love the firm grasp that lifts you seemingly effortlessly to enable once again an excited process of throwing yourselves at complete strangers.