The Ned Wood Archive

I thought you and me might wander

Bruce Springsteen, Pyramid Stage, June 2009

Sam

The rain is playing on Sam’s tent when he wakes up. Dancing over the nylon fly. Experimenting with multiple rhythms to get the right effect to match Steve Reich’s famous forecast. Or maybe the follow up “I told you it was gonna rain”.

It’s so good laying in the tent listening. Sam is trying to pick up a pattern in the pattering. He was wrong about the Steve Reich comparison. The rain is random. Steve Reich’s genius is the repetition. He’s lulled back to sleep until he’s woken by his battered old alarm clock. His trusty analogue, clockwork alarm which has never let him down.

5:45. Gives him plenty of time to give sacrifice at the long drops, take a large, leisurely breakfast from the wonderful people at Ivy Mead, wash it down with a cup of tea, or two, brush his teeth, and head over to the recycling centre.

Sam’s down a rabbit hole. A Steve Reich rabbit hole. Have you ever seen a performance of his track “Drumming”? You can watch it open mouthed in awe at the technique, straining your senses to capture every nuance of the players’ expertise or you can just relax and be mesmerised by the beauty. As with most things in life, the less you strive, the more you enjoy. They should get that on the Pyramid Stage.

It’s still tipping it when he turns up at the recycling centre, so he squeezes into the tent along with everyone else on this shift and joins the line for his PPE and his high viz and his extra special gloves. This is the first day, so you have to get your handouts as well as signing in. The PPE is just a lightweight set of overalls which will just about last for the four shifts. The high viz is bright yellow for the volunteers to distinguish them from the professionals who wear orange. The gloves are pretty thick gloves to protect them from glass and other sharp rubbish. There’s also the option of face mask, goggles, and even ear protectors, although most folk don’t bother.

Sam’s done this before, so he gets signed in, gets his stuff, and gets dressed quickly. He spots the other folk he knows from previous years: punky Dave, Mike, and, of course, some of the Yorkshire crew. There’s a massive group that come down from God’s County every year. He knows many of them and each year he meets a few more. But he’ll always hear tales of yet more others that he’s never met. They all do different shifts, different jobs, different times; however, a few – Jill, Karen, Fiona, Julie – always work at the recycling centre. He calls them the Hebden Girls after that Jimmy Pursey song. You know: Hebden girls, Hebden girls, laced up boots and strings o’ pearls. Now he’ll probably have to call the Riot Women.

They’re amazing people. Sam always feels at home with them, even those of them that he hasn’t met before. Seems like they all fit right in with each other and just pick up on conversations that they were having this time last year. “Still planning to move house?” “How’s your Mam getting on?” “How’s your sister’s job going?” “Wasn’t Brandi Carlile wonderful?”

Matty interrupts their chat with a shout to get their attention. He’s the guy that runs the recycling centre. Normally he gives them a welcome talk outside the tent but, as it’s raining too heavily, he gets them to walk across into the recycling barns and addresses everyone there.

The recycling Centre itself is a row of four massive barns which create one gigantic undercover recycling area. Bagged up litter from across the site is brought up to the back of the barn, the east side of the centre, on the back of trailers, and is dumped in piles inside the two outer barns. The recycling itself is done in the two central barns and the sorted output leaves from the front of the centre on a succession of bin lorries.

Matty explains the plan. It’s pretty much the same as the year before and the year before that. There’s one central conveyor belt fed by eight recycling belts. Eight pairs of loaders feed the recycling belts from the pile of bagged up litter and the rest of the crew, who are lined up along the recycling belts, pick out the useful stuff. Useful generally means stuff that the folk at the commercial recycling centre in Bristol will pay for. Cans mostly. Glass. Plastic bottles. Cardboard. These get put in various wheelie bins and then transferred to dedicated bin lorries. Other stuff like nox cylinders, vapes, & batteries gets stored and recycled separately. Most of the food goes to compost. The rest goes to landfill.

The crew do their own recycling as well. You’ll always get unopened cans of beer, so these get saved and consumed later. Bits of clothing too, some of which is worth keeping. You quite often get traders throw stuff out. One year, they found about twenty new pork pie hats just slung out in the litter. They became part of the recycling uniform that year. A guy got hold of a first class Arcadia hoodie once. Some minor loose change will always show up. Sam found a credit card on one of his shifts a few years back. Took that to the bank in town and handed it in. Then he found Andy Kershaw’s personal Glastonbury file. He saved his mobile number in case he needed to call him, but lost it when his old phone went belly up. And last year he came across a back stage pass for Rod. Access All Areas.

Matty’s finished. Most of the crew have done it before, so they know what to do. They automatically sort themselves into the same teams and take up the same positions. Sam joins the same belt as the other folk he knows. Third belt along. The belts are all more or less the same, apart from the ones at the eastern end. They get drenched by the rain when it’s wet and roasted by the sun when it isn’t. Worth avoiding. The newbies are taken to a specific belt and given a gentler introduction. Everyone else gets down to work. Time goes more quickly when you’re busy.

You know what would make this go even faster? If they piped some Steve Reich into the barn. It’d have to be pretty loud to be heard above the clanging and crashing of bottles and cans and the like, but it would get your mind into that trance-like flow that allows you to work automatically and makes you lose all sense of time. Sam’ll suggest that to Matty for next year.