The Ned Wood Archive

Sam

Sam’s walking along Pilton Parlour Road looking to see where Ron and Jane are.  He knows they’ll be roughly in the same spot, half way along, a few yards down from the benches.  Ade and Linda could be there too.  He’ll pop over and see them three or four times during the festival.  Chat with Ron for a minute or two if it’s just the two of them.  Chat with Ade and Linda for longer if Ade’s there with him.

There they are.  All four of them.  Sat on their camp chairs, facing the stage.  Or, more accurately, facing the screens next to the stage.

“Futureheads played a secret gig last night.”  It’s the first thing Ron says.  Before Hello or How you doing or whatever.  He didn’t go.  He never would have done.  He’s been surfing and he’s picked up all of the gossip.  Ron loves the gossip.  More than that, he’s part of it.  He feels like he’s seen the Futureheads do a secret set, just like he feels he was at Lorde and Haim the previous year, just like he feels he’s been part of everything that happens at Glastonbury.  It’s all one with him feeling like Glastonbury, the festival, is one single, massive great organism.  Glastonbury behaves as a coherent individual being. He’s part of it.  Everything that happens to anyone at Glastonbury happens to everyone at Glastonbury.  

“Oh, where was that?” asks Sam.  

“BBC Introducing.”

“Oh, well.”

He would have gone had he known, but he hadn’t so there it is.  You can’t go to Glastonbury if you suffer from fear of missing out.  You’ll always miss something, loads, everyday, so it’d just kill you.

Sam’s standing to one side of the four chairs.  That way he can survey the whole field, see what’s going on down at the stage.  They’re showing those public information films in between sets.  It’s like when he was really young and that’s all they showed on BBC2.  The same films over and over again about plastics and the Aswan Dam.

“I’m in this one,” he says.  They’re showing the “Love the Farm, Leave No Trace” film.  There’s a clip from inside the recycling centre that includes a few frames of Sam’s crew.  They managed to film the only few seconds from Sam’s full set of four five-hour shifts when Sam isn’t doing anything.  It makes him look like one of those celebrities swanning around African famines.

“You sprayed shit in any dance tents recently?” asks Ron.  He brings it up every time.  Sometimes more than once.  He repeats the tale for the benefit of Ade and Linda and Jane, who probably haven’t heard it for a day or so.  And for added effect, he makes it personal.

“So, Sam’s driving this tractor, the one that sucks out all of the crap from the long drops and he presses blow instead of suck and sprays all of the shit into this dance tent and he covers the punters.  Best thing you ever did, mate.”

Less of the ‘Glastonbury is a single being’ there, then Ron?  What are the dance tent punters?  Are they not part of the Glastonbury entity?  Are they parasitic organisms?

Everyone knows the story or a variant of it.  Though, truth is, Sam is never 100% sure about it.  He wasn’t there. He’s never spoken to anyone who was there.  He’s never spoken to anyone who knows anyone who was there.  On the other hand, human error can arrange for almost anything.  You could easily spray sewage back into one of the trumps instead of sucking it out.  He calls the long drops “trumps” because, what else would you call something that’s so full of shit?  Maybe someone just pushed the wrong button or threw the wrong lever or whatever it is. But you’d need to put some effort into actually spraying it into a tent.

“They were trying to clean up the tent,” Ron explains.  He’s researched this.

“When they sent out the crew they would have said to them: ‘go and clean out the tent the same way you clean out the toilets, but whatever you do, don’t press blow’.”  Not only has he researched it, he’s studied the psychiatry behind it.  “When you spend so long telling someone not to do something, their mind fixates on what you’ve told them not to do.  Just increases the chances of it happening.”

“It’s like with golf or tennis,” says Ade.  He does a bit of golf himself, so he knows a bit about this.  “You keep telling someone they’re going to hit the ball into the bunker, they will.  You keep telling them they’re going to hit the ball into the net, they will.”

“Oh, so it’s John McEnroe’s fault that the dance tent got showered?” says Sam.

“Yep.  That’s it,” says Ade.  “Well, he is usually to blame when stuff goes wrong.”

“Anyway, what do you do with the shit when you aren’t filling the dance floor with it?” asks Ron.  He’s still conflating recycling of litter with sewage treatment.  Mind you there is some overlap.  Folk sometimes use the toilets as litter bins, that’s true.  And he occasionally sees evidence on the recycling line of some poor punter having mistaken the rubbish bins for a long drop.

“I expect they do the same as we do,” says Sam, stressing the pronouns.  “They’ll take the sewage, store it on site, do a first pass on it to remove what they can of the stuff that can’t be treated and then ship it to the professionals off site.”

He did talk to someone who worked on the sewage once.  They do put it in tanks somewhere on the farm and they do filter some stuff out.  They had a leak once which was big news because it polluted the river.  They got in big trouble for that.  They’re usually pretty good though.  Sam thinks they do more than they need to to look after the local environment.  Like when they drive up and down the A361 cleaning the mud off the road.

“Apparently they get lots of false teeth in the sewage,” Sam tells them.  “And once they found someone’s prosthetic leg.”

“I lost my phone once,” says Ade, slightly apropos.  “Not in the toilets.  Linda got a call from Henry’s Beard to say they’d found it and could I go round.”  

“Happened to me, too,” says Ron.  Lost it when I was packing up one day.  Next day, when I’d got home, I got a call on the home number.  Wanted to know my address.  Sent the phone back first class.  No return address or anything, so I couldn’t write back and thank them.”

“I found a phone once.  Just looked through the recent calls, called the most recent number guessing it’d be someone they’d just spoken to at the festival, and arranged to meet up and hand the phone over.  Couldn’t do that now, though, could you.  You wouldn’t be able to unlock the phone or anything.”

“Yeah.  Modern life is rubbish.”