Glasto -10

It was a long way to go to pitch these five tents. And fairly expensive, getting a train to Bristol (on Friday night) then hiring a car to get Firstborn and me to the Glastonbury site today. Also moderately mad, since we were just staking a claim to territory and almost certainly four of those tents will get shifted a metre or three by the contingent arriving next weekend to camp with us. (The fifth tent is too big and cumbersome for anyone to want to move it.)

But at least my heaviest festival stuff is now on site. 

I took most of it on the train to Bristol on Friday evening in my big, ancient, patched-up backpack and in the wheelie-bag Firstborn lent me in Sicily. In Bristol I returned the wheelie bag and transferred the stuff in it into my own fairly respectable backpack that FB brought back from Sicily (along with the music I should have kept with me) three weeks ago.

In Bristol, my daughter-in-law lent me a taller tent than my Oxford friend had lent me, so that went into the car boot and I pitched it at Glastonbury today along with the others, emptied the stuff from my respectable backpack into it, drove the car back to Bristol and returned it. Then caught a train back to Oxford carrying my friend's tent (and my music scores) in my respectable backpack. I am absurdly proud to be wearing a pre-festival wristband saying 'Build & Break/H&S-inducted'. Yes, I do know how deep the electricity cables and gas pipelines are buried. I feel like a proper electrician.

When I actually go to the festival, by train, bus, lift or whatever, I'll take the rest of my stuff (clothes) in yet another scruffy backpack that I've had for years. (Anyone remember that riddle about the farmer transporting a fox, a chicken and a sack of corn across a river?)

The blip is of our sloping campsite. Photos showing the extraordinary sets that are under construction are very strictly forbidden pre-festival and anyway, I didn't see any.