The Ned Wood Archive

Ellie

It wasn’t planned or anything.  She just suddenly saw him on the bench looking at some piece of paper and she said the first thing that came into her mind.  She’d been talking to Phoebe about who to see that afternoon and there he was in front of her.  Just sat there, combing his hair like a beached mermaid.  So she went for it.  You’re only young once.  Plus, you’re at Glastonbury.  You are meant to have fun.  She can worry about next week on Monday.  That’s forever away.  In addition, her being with Phoebe meant that she was a bit more boisterous.  A bit more confident.  A bit more pushy.  It happens when the girls get together and hunt in packs.  And when he asked about breakfast.  Why not?  Then, when she said that what she really fancied for breakfast was a Danish pastry and he said he knew exactly where to go, that is, if she didn’t mind a bit of a trek, a small one, only about ten or fifteen minutes, then she was up for that too.  Of course she didn’t mind a trek.  She looked straight into his eyes, smiled, and said, yes, that would be fine.  

So they walked down the track past West Holts.  Ellie looked across the field towards the stage.  The flags near them were flapping around, gossipping about the antics they’d witnessed the previous afternoon.  Telling each other about groups of festival goers drinking too much.  The flags have seen it all before, year in year out.  You could drink one pint of cider, but not too.  They’d see it every year.  Bodies stretched across the grass with two paper cups from the Brothers Bar, one either side.  The murder weapons left at the scene of the crime.  Ellie could hear the sound coming from the top of the flag poles and even though she couldn’t understand the language, her ears were burning.  She knew they were talking about her and her crew.

Joe took her past all of the eateries on that stretch and past Carhenge and the Meeting Point and then right towards the Acoustic Tent.  Glastonbury is a lot less busy in the mornings, but there are still a fair few folk milling around, most of them after something substantial to kick off the day. 

Between the rotating Tony Benn tower at the Meeting Point and the entrance to the Acoustic Tent area, there are a row of stalls, one of the last of which is a bakery.  It’s by far the busiest.  Those in the know, like Joe, come here for some of the finest food on site.  Ellie chooses a cinnamon swirl and Joe, in honour of his French plait, a Danish plait.  He pays.  She decides that she won’t argue.  

“You don’t have a pound, do you?” he asks her.

She doesn’t carry any change with her.  

“Not a problem,” he says.  He gets out his wallet and extracts £20.  

“Sometimes, it’s better to have change,” he tells Ellie as the lass at the bakery breaks the twenty and gives him a note and some coins.  He holds two pounds in his hand and stuffs the rest in one of his many pockets.  He moves over to the next stall which is selling fruit.  He catches the eye of one of the servers, plonks the coins on the counter, says “bananas”, and helps himself to the two biggest and brightest from the bunches displayed.  OK, so he’s jumped the queue, but he hasn’t slowed anyone down. OK, so he’s paid over the odds for the fruit, but then everything is ten times better at Glastonbury.

“Now we can really enjoy breakfast,” he says, giving Ellie her swirl and her banana.  Then he whispers conspiratorially “these will be five for a pound on Monday.”  They walk round into the Theatre Field so they can sit on one of the benches over by the Atchin Tan caravan and eat in comfort.