The Ned Wood Archive

I was crawlin’ through a festival way out west

Bruce Springsteen, Pyramid Stage, June 2009

Sam

Sam is in the queue for lunch. After the shift, he showered and changed as quickly as he could in an attempt to miss the rush. It never works. There’s quite a few folk go straight in after their shifts. No worries. The queue moves quickly. Good job, too. It’s starting to rain again and Sam doesn’t want to be queueing outside for long. He usually eats here, unless there is some really good act on early, and then goes “into town” as he calls the festival site. The food is really good. And it’s free for workers!

He gets served a massive portion of vegan moussaka with plenty of salad on top and scans the marquee looking for familiar faces. It doesn’t matter that there aren’t any he can see – even if you sit next to someone you don’t know, you soon strike up a conversation. He spots Lex and Lyn in the queue waiting to be served and they wave at him, so he grabs a seat next to some empty spaces and puts his day pack on one to sort of reserve a couple of seats for them. Looks like they only just made it into the tent before the rain really started to tip down. Mini waterfalls are cascading down at the entrance.

“You enjoy this morning?” he asks when they sit down. They look at each other as if they need each other’s permission before answering. The one with the slightly longer hair answers first. He can’t remember which is Lyn and which is Lex. He’ll have to come up with a better name for them than short hair and slightly longer hair or black hair and battleship grey hair. Thing is, if they had names that were more different, like Laverne and Shirley or Mel and Kim or Thelma and Louise, it’d be much easier. But Lyn and Lex? His brain’s not good enough to cope.

“Actually it was good fun. You soon get used to it. Don’t you think Lex?” she says. Sam says “long hair Lyn” to himself twice to try to make it stick.

“The smell wasn’t too bad,” says Lex. Sam knows that this is because they were processing new, recently picked up litter this morning. The barn works on a last in first out basis, so you’re mainly dealing with stuff that hasn’t had much chance to fester. Things get bad if there’s a delay in the processing, like when it rains and rubbish gets much harder to pick. Then you start drilling down into older, sweatier garbage. He doesn’t say that, though. Don’t want to put them off too soon.

They tell him again that, not only is this their first time recycling, it’s actually their first Glastonbury. They’d tried for tickets a couple of times and had been on the waiting list for work too. Just at the last minute, their number came up and here they are. Sam says he’s heard of that happening – people phoning up and just having it be the right time to call. From speaking to various folk, though, when that happens, they usually get an after festival shift or one of the shifts that nobody wants like afternoons during the festival. Then again, there were at least ten newbies this morning, so Sam realises, I guess I don’t really know what I’m talking about.

“When did you get here?” asks Sam.

“Last night,” says the one with slightly longer hair. Sam still thinks that’s Lyn. “7 ish”.

“You seen much of the site?”

“We went down to the Pyramid stage after we’d set up. Got some of the atmosphere. And we hung around for the fireworks.”

“We need to work out where Strummerville is for this afternoon. There’s a band we know playing.”

Sam offers to help. “When are they on? Who is it? I can show you. If you don’t mind waiting until this rain slows down”

“Does it always rain at Glastonbury?” asks Lex. By this time, they’ve been joined by Jill, Anne, and Tilly. Jill and Anne are on the same crew as them, but Tilly got on the tractor crew this year. That was something she’d always wanted since she first started coming.

“Rain’s one thing you’re always guaranteed at Glastonbury,” says Jill.

“There are two things you’re guaranteed,” says Sam. “Freedom and rain.” He’s pleased with that. He got it from a June Tabor song.

“Kindness, Freedom, and Rain,” says Anne.

“That’s the sort of thing me Gran would say,” says Lex. “Kindness and Freedom. She always said that England was the kindest and the freest place on earth. She’d tell me that wherever you went up and down the country, you could do what you wanted and most people would be kind enough to let you!”

“My gran might have said something like that too,” says Anne. “Though she would maybe have said kindness & tolerance. We should show kindness & tolerance to others – that was her motto. It’s the British psyche, isn’t it really? Kindness & tolerance. That’s who we are. We are kind to everyone we meet and we tolerate others. Ideally, we’d empower others to be themselves, but that’s a bit too pro-active for us Brits, isn’t it? We aren’t going to put the effort in to empower others, now, are we?

“We’re not as tolerant as we used to be, are we, though?” says Lyn.

“Oh, we are,” says Anne. “All of us, here.”

So Sam volunteers to guide Lyn and Lex round Glastonbury that afternoon. Which means he has to try very hard to get their names right. Lyn – longer hair. Lyn – longer hair. Just keep repeating that.

He finds it easier to talk to Lyn. If that is indeed her name. Lex, the other one, is a bit like a Tunnock tea cake. Sam will find this out later as he gets to know her better. She’s got this harder shell on the outside, like the chocolate covering, but once you get past that, once you get to know her better, you find that she’s really sweet inside. It just takes time is all. Lyn, though, she has this knack of getting to know you. This knack of asking the right question to get you talking. About home. About his family. About his digital detox. And yet, it doesn’t seem like he’s hogging the conversation either. The one with shorter hair is quieter, but the other still manages to defer to her sometimes. He’s reminded of that lass from Samaritans he spoke to one year. He was wandering round the markets when this lass came up and started talking to him about his shirt. Some old shirt he was wearing at the time. Typical festival wear. Sam and this person from Samaritans just spent ten minutes or so just nattering. About life. I mean, that was her job, I guess, but, as she explained to Sam, there’s a knack to it. You find something that you have in common with the person you are talking with and get them to identify with you in some way, whether it be shared fashion sense, shared football team, shared geography, shared musical taste, whatever. She told Sam that once you get people talking, just talking about anything, then they are more likely to open up about other things. The important things. What’s really bothering them. She never asked Sam how he was feeling or if he wanted to tell her anything, but Sam did feel as if he could have opened up.

And that’s what Lyn’s like. So Sam starts opens up to them, Lyn and Lex, about the reasons behind his digital detox and the quieter one with shorter hair (Lex, right?) gets a bit more animated when he mentions politics and is slagging off Israel and Farage and railing about oil and people still addicted to it and about the limits to tolerance in the UK and being verbally abused in the toilets. That’s something else he finds out about later. She has these occasional passionate rages. Lyn tolerates them and then moves on.

Sam gets back to finding your way around the site. He starts to explain how to get to Strummerville. First he says that it is at the far south of the place. He gets blank looks from both Lyn and Lex. Which way is south they ask? He points and tells them to look at the sun, but that doesn’t seem to help. Plus, the sun has decided that it’s not going to help anyone today. Then he creates a simple map with the plates and cutlery. This is us, this is the Pyramid, this is the muddy lane, this is… he’s running out of resources to use, but he can see that four pairs of eyes have glazed over again.

OK, I’ll take you. Over the years, he’s come to accept that some folk aren’t as good with maps as he is. He’s got excellent spatial memory. Some people have OK spatial memory. Some people have none. That’s OK. Sad thing is, they don’t tell you about neurodiversity at school. They don’t teach you about it at work. You have to find out for yourself. It’s only in the last five years that he’s found out about aphantasia. He was explaining how to give a presentation to someone and said “a picture is worth a thousand words” and they said “why do you say that? What makes a picture better?” It turned out that the person he was talking to couldn’t form an image of anything in his brain. If you said “imagine a dog” the other person couldn’t tell him anything about the dog he was imagining. It staggered him to find out everyone’s brain was different. Now it fascinates him. Why should it be the case that everyone’s brain is the same. No-one else he knows likes the Only Ones. In fact, no-one else he knows has heard of the Only Ones. So if musical taste is different, why shouldn’t that apply to other stuff about your brain? The world is much better with everyone having different musical tastes otherwise everyone would be crowding the acoustic stage to see Lyle Lovett on Saturday, whereas this way, the way it is, he can get pretty close to the front and enjoy Lyle Lovett in comfort while everyone else is at Raiohead or Suede or Lily Allen. It must be the same with evolution favouring neuro diversity. That makes sense too – humans are better off if different people in the group think differently: different individuals can solve different problems, different individuals want to do different things.

So what is it called when you can’t visualise maps and stuff? He does actually draw them a map, just in case. Borrows a pen from someone and uses an old envelope. They take one look at it and give it back to him. To be fair, it’d be like giving Sam some sheet music. He’d know which was the top and which was the bottom and that’s about it.

Sam commits to two things. He’ll make his tour as simple as possible. And he’ll join them up at Strummerville for whatever band it is they are going to see.

“First things first. Can you get to the recycling centre?” They are standing outside the marquee now, on the track running along the side of the campsite. Lyn and Lex both point in the right direction – towards the cabin at the east end of Tom’s Field.

“Right then, let’s go.”

They walk past the cabin, turn right onto the road from Mary’s Gate, over the cross roads and past the recycling centre.

“OK,” says Sam, “thing one: it’s pretty much straight down from here” as he points down Muddy Lane. He wants to point out various other routes, like the back way to the Acoustic Tent and tell them how useful it is for avoiding crushes, but this first time things need to be simple.

They arrive at Tony Benn’s tower and Lex starts to get excited. She can see the cars and the other vehicles littered around Carhenge and she wants to explore. Lyn asks Sam how long it’s gonna take to walk up to Strummerville and they work out they’ve got plenty of time, so they walk round the motors.

This area is like Glastonbury’s town square. William’s Green. There’s what’s called the meeting place, I guess so that people can arrange to meet there. There are various information tents and a merch stall. There’s the Deafzone where Sam learned some rudimentary sign language one year but never used it. Here’s where they put up a massive screen one year so people could watch some rugby game, but that totally clogged up the space, so they never did that again.

Then there’s Carhenge. Glastonbury’s own monument to wasted mutoids. A horseshoe of upright cars, some of them standing alone, many of them paired and with another car on top like the massive trilithons at Stonehenge, just down the road. There are some pretty impressive items here, but Lex makes straight for the two tone 2CV perched regally on two other cars.

“Me Mam had one of those,” she tells Sam.

“We should ask them if we can take it for a test drive,” he says.

Sam thinks Carhenge is the type of thing that makes Glastonbury so much better than any other festival. Maybe better than any other place on earth. It’s a testament to the genius of Michael Eavis. The way he sets the place up. He finds folk he can trust and gives them an area and just lets them get on with it. He’ll set the vibe to begin with. Like saying “Glastonbury is all about Freedom, Kindness, and Rain” so that anyone contributing will know which direction to go in. Maybe he even really uses those words. Whatever he does, the result is that you end up with all of these amazing areas to wander round. Sam did a pitch at work once on Micheal Eavis’ leadership style. It went OK.

The next landmark is the Red Tea Bus. As they’ve been walking, he’s realised that there is one problem with not using his phone. He doesn’t know what time it is so he’s not sure exactly when they need to arrive at Strummerville and how quickly they should walk to get up there. Normally Sam would drop in for a cuppa and the tea bus, but he’ll let Lyn and Lex decide when to dilly and when to dally.

He points out Jazz World to them.

“What” says Lyn.

Sam corrects himself: “West Holts, I mean”. You can tell how long someone’s been coming to Glastonbury by what they call the various areas. Only newbies talk about Woodsies. Most people still use Peel. The more experienced folk talk about Lost Vagueness when they mean Shangri La. Only the really old and the really pretentious say NME stage when they mean the Other Stage.

Sam tells Lyn and Lex about that time, one year, when he was sat at Jazz World reading a book. It was in the morning, maybe ten o’clock. A few years ago because he must have been on one of the shifts after the festival. Ages ago, because there was a bookstall facing the Jazz World stage and that hasn’t been there for years. There used to be bookstalls various places. Like near the Tiny Tea Tent and down near the Circus Tent and up near the Park. There was even a Rough Trade up near the Park one year. Now the only place you could get a book is that old tat stall on the Undle Ground up towards the Stone Circle.

Anyway, he’d bought this book from the stall near Jazz World. Second hand. PG Wodehouse probably. Something easy to read. That was why he got it. And he’d sat down on one of the sleepers just around here, near the track. He’d sat astride the sleeper, elbows on his knees, chin cupped in his hands, bent over, looking down at this book to find out what Bertie Wooster was up to.

Pretty soon, this lass, maybe 20, 25, comes up and starts chatting to him. Nice friendly stuff, like how are you doing and what have you seen and who are you gonna see. And naturally he starts chatting back. It’s a really easy conversation to have and Sam was thinking if this was London or Manchester or most other places, he’d shrink into himself and try and ignore her. But here it’s different. Easy to connect. They must have spoken for half an hour or so. Just sat there in the morning sun that one day at Jazz World.

He can’t remember her name or even whether he even asked her. All he can remember about this lass now is that she was working at a Mac ‘n’ Cheese stall and that she wanted a yellow Guardian Bag. That was when they sold papers and gave away these backpacks with them. You saw loads of people with them. She’d seen them but hadn’t known how to get one. Out of all of the things that they talked about it was those two facts that stuck with him.

It was only after she’d left him that he realised that she’d seen him with his head bowed down, staring at the ground, and that she had maybe thought he was ill or depressed or something and that she’d checked in with him to see whether he was OK or whether he needed anything. Just showing the awareness and concern to help a fellow human being out. He’d never said thank you. So he’d gone and bought himself another paper just to get the yellow bag. If you checked out all of the stalls, you would have been able to find one with the right colour. Then he’d gone round all of the Mac and Cheese paces to find her so he could give it to her by way of a proper thank you. But he never did see her again.