Here be dragons

The Kidzfield opens at noon on Glastonbury Thursday. From ten to, inside the wire fence, we play our instruments, beat our drums, clown, dance, juggle and whoop for the children jumping with excitement outside. When the gate opens, they just race onto the field.

In our music tent this year keyboards have been added to the violins, cellos, ukuleles and guitars (percussion and other amplified instruments are next door in the even noisier tent). Right from the start we had loads of children wanting to play. Our violins and cellos are mostly really bad quality so as a two-year-old beats out their rhythm on the violin wood with tiny fists, I can tell the parent saying, 'Don't break it,' that they really don't need to worry. I can give the child a white-board marker and show them how to strum. Or I can give them a bow and show them where the mouse lives on the squeakiest part of the violin, then we can find other animals. I just love banishing anxiety and fear and watching a child's excitement at the sounds they make.

The big stages don't open today but there's lots going on in bars and on some of the small stages so after my teaching shift I wandered round hunting good sounds. Nothing really grabbed me until The Scribes at Open Arms. (Disclosure - I am very closely related to their beatboxer, Pye). Of their four gigs here this year, this was the one not on the programme, so the bodies in the tent were very much closer to the bar than the stage. An opportunity for me to admire frontman, Shaun's, awesome talent for drawing people in.

Somehow, this gig reunited me with my enthusiasm (thanks, guys!) which I then took with me to look at mad things in the dark then to hear Duo Ruut, an Estonian duo who accompany their singing with a kannel (Estonian zither), one of them playing on each side. 
Then Afrodelic, a 'fusion of traditional Malian music and electronic sounds'.

I chatted with some of our team about taking a while to arrive mentally and I was not the only one.