The Ned Wood Archive

I’m just a man stuck pushing some wheel

Kula Shaker, 1996

Joe

Joe’s been snoozing. Letting himself drift in and out of sleep. He can hear the whispers of the other folk in the queue. He can feel the daylight on the outside of his eyelids. He’d put his waterproofs on when he reached the queue, jacket and trousers, just in case, then he’d squatted down on the grass, leaned back on his rucksack, and resolved to get as much kip as possible. He needed to shift his position every so often to stay comfortable, but at least the rain wasn’t too strong, just on and off like his kip.

Now he’s staving off being fully awake, clutching at those last moments of rest before he returns to life. He tries to listen in on a conversation going on nearby hoping that this will help him back to the last remnant of his golden slumbers. However, the buzz gets louder as the people around him start to fidget more often. Now he knows he isn’t going to fall asleep again. Back to reality. Beautiful reality. The excitement kicks in. He loves this place. He can’t wait to get in. He turns his phone back on. Christ! It’s only 6!

He looks up at the sky and watches the clouds rolling up the valley from the Somerset Levels. Maybe it’ll rain some more. Maybe not. With luck, it’ll be dry and hold off until they’ve got all of the tents up. As if he’s willed it to happen, a light rain starts to fall again.

He looks around at the others in the queue. Some of them have been here since early Tuesday evening. The groups with all of their equipment surrounding them, snoozing in their camping chairs, fully laden trolleys ready to roll. The couples with overstuffed back packs; boots and tents and other bags tied to the outside by their laces or straps. Bloody annoying when they bounce around as you’re striding along the track. Most of these are bringing all of their stuff into the site in one go. One long, slow, tiring trek to their campsite. He sees one or two professionals like himself and Tom. Just a single well packed rucksack. Just the stuff they’ll need on that first morning. He knows he’ll overtake the folk with the heavier loads as he walks across the site. He knows he’ll get to where he wants to camp more quickly. It’s about speed not quantity at this stage in proceedings.

There are four main entrances to Glastonbury: two to the east and two to the west. The car parks are outside those entrances, although car parks is a rather glorious term for what are just fields of open space. Mind, the car parks are pretty big. About the same size as the festival itself, taken altogether. You’re directed to the nearest car park, east if you come from London or the south, west if you come down the M5 or from the west. Some folk like to drive around the back roads like through Ditcheat, Evercreech, and places, so they can find the best place to park, but you can’t always trust that the roads won’t be blocked, either officially to force you onto the main routes or unofficially by some rogue farmer. And everyone has their favourite spot to camp which governs which gate they want to enter through. Maybe they want to camp close to the stages they want to go to the most. Maybe their campsite is from tradition or habit. Maybe some places really are better than others.

He needs to stretch, so he stands up and goes through a few exaggerated contortions to wake his body up. Reaches for the sky with his fingertips. Lunges for a clean piece of grass with each of his legs. Rotates left and right at his waist to get rid of the memory of his backpack. A few nods at the others in the queue which soon turn to chats. Where’re you camping? Who’s on your list? Who’s guesting with who? Have you heard the rumours? Funny that some people still think Oasis are going to turn up. Most of them have guessed who The Thamesmen on the Saturday are. And like he thought, most of these folk are after camping near Pyramid. One chap explains to him how he’s in the wrong place. He needs to be at Gate D for Pennard. Joe’s not going to argue. He does things his own way, thank you. In fact, he’s a creature of habit. He’s always been coming the same way: off the 303 at Wincanton, through Castle Cary, then Ditcheat to the 37. No, that’s not completely true. He has done Bruton once or twice. You know, you could catch a train from Wincanton to Pennard once. But you just can’t ride the boxcars anymore.

The time passes more quickly when you’re chatting, but it’s still early, so the conversation often dries up. When it does, he occupies himself with thoughts of festivals past. Memories of this stage or that band, of the Circus Field or the Greenpeace Field or the other landmarks, of times just spent sitting outside the Tea Bus watching the world go past.

As 8 am approaches, everyone stands up, fusses with their kit, and starts to squeeze forward, condensing the line. Then a cheer, and the gates are open. Backpack up and on, a short wait, a pace forward, another short wait. Repeat. Finally, he can properly move. Along the last few yards, and in. Through the entrance tent. Ticket checked. Wristband on. He’s buzzing now. It’s started.

He turns left onto the muddy dirt track and strides down the hill, dodging between the trolleys and the trailers, passing a couple of couples who have stopped to argue about where exactly they are going. Passing the folk taking a break: those with heavy loads to carry and heavy trailers to pull. All of the hardware is holding up this morning. He did see someone with a broken trolley once. Right as soon as they got in. Hadn’t lasted five minutes. This guy walked past, spotted the problem, and patched it up with some Gorilla tape he was carrying. Can’t have been that bad, then. You do see worse: broken axles or twisted wheels sometimes. Stuff that’s not strong enough to make it far at all. A loose wheel or something like that can be fixed. He’s got a spanner and a couple of bolts back in the car. Maybe he should carry a repair kit round with him and help out the poor campers like that bloke with the Gorilla tape did. His sister Megan does that. Megan’s like always carrying that repair stuff with her. It’s one of those things that she does to define herself. She’s a fixer. But she’s got that sort of brain. Engineer brain. Structures and strengths. She can spot when something will hold and when something won’t and she knows what she can do to make that stuff more secure. Not for the first time he tells himself that he should be more Megan. His brain carries on having this discussion with himself while his feet autonomously guide him to his destination.

Carhenge, the Red Tea Bus, Jazz World, Greenpeace, the railway line to the Glade then up onto the hill. The usual sights. Like the familiar stretch of road back to your old dears’ place. Tom’s already there. Of course he is. It’s easy to find him. That spot on the left hand side outside the Green Fields where the ground levels off for a bit. He’s already laid out three or four tents on the ground to stake their claim. Joe does the same: opens his back pack out and takes out his tent, Duncan’s tent, James’ tent, and George’s tent. Plus the one he’s lending their Megan. They’ll all be arriving later. For now, it’s up to Joe and Tom to arrange the camp. Across the hill, all across the festival, other advance parties are arriving and staking out their own claims, just the same.

They work in silence, mostly. They know what they’re doing. Tom’s got that serious “I mean business” look on his face. Joe’s in the zone, not thinking, just doing. The way the two of them get things done – Tom him taking the lead, Joe playing second fiddle – it works. It’s a sort of unspoken agreement. They know what the other person is doing, so they just get on with it. And it’s just so much more efficient. To be honest, they don’t argue much about it cos they’re both on the same wavelength. And Joe can live with Tom’s comments. His reminders. His nags. He just ignores them. He can just go into don’t care mode cos that stuff doesn’t really matter.

And he’s singing to himself.

I’m only happy when it rains
I’m only happy when it’s complicated

Snatches of lyric that pop into his head. Sometimes obvious. Sometimes relevant. Sometimes just plain random. Words that are stored in the forgotten cupboards of his brain and under the stairs of his memory. Phrases that surface when his mind is in flow. Lines from the songs he grew up with. Lines from the songs he loves. Like Garbage. Like Arctic Monkeys. Like Gaslight Anthem. They were always his band, the Anthem, no-one else’s. He’s not sure whether he’s singing these songs out loud or just in his mind, though he guesses that if they were being sung out loud, he’d get complaints from Tom. That happens when he sings on the streets of London. People complain. He knows he can’t really hold a tune.

Pour your misery down
Pour your misery down on me

The first job is to claim enough space for everyone who’s coming. That means laying out the tents, fly sheets, and whatever else they’ve got on the ground. Then, one by one, erect the tents to make the settlement more permanent. Just the poles and a couple of pegs is enough. Joe can normally do a tent by himself, like Tom, but now and then one will ask the other to “just give me a hand with this”. You get the tents roughly in position, then you go round again, fine tuning the exact location and putting in all of the pegs. Thankfully, the rain’s stopped now and there’s not any wind, so it’s pretty straightforward. They know that some of the others will be turning up soon – some of the folk coming from Joe’s work in London will be there at 10 or 11. Tom’s mates from Bristol should be there soon, too. That lot can finish their own tents. Tom’s shared his location, so they’ll have no trouble finding them, assuming there’s a signal. It’s only when the festival’s really going and the main acts are on and everyone wants to meet up afterwards that the networks can’t cope.

Joe checks the tents to decide which to do next after his own. His sister, Megan, won’t be down til tomorrow, so that needs to go up first. No-one else will do it. Duncan, Alex, & James will be here soon, so theirs can wait. Just in case they arrive in time to do the tents themselves. Heaven knows when George’ll be down – he’s a law unto himself, so you never know. Tom is town planning – arranging the groups of mates together. He’s put George’s tent next to Joe’s, but Joe decides that George, Jack, and James should be as far away as possible. They’ll all be out all night in the dance village or Shangri La and he doesn’t want woken up when they come back at four or five in the morning. Joe’s getting old! He’s promised to pace himself this year. Not that it’ll make a blind bit of difference. Pennard is always crowded and you can bet that 50% of your neighbours will be partying at Shangri La until the not so small hours. He may have the even more mature Tom on his left and the generally quite quiet Megs on his right, but it’s bound to be the case that the tent behind will be full of the Guinness Book of Record’s holders of the Deep Purple Award for noisiest revellers.

There was that time, what ten years back, maybe more, when they were chatting to the guys in the tent behind them who said they were working at Arcadia as fire stewards. Now he thinks about it, Joe is a bit sceptical about the story, cos wouldn’t they be in some staff campsite? Maybe. Whatever, he believed them back then. He was young. These guys were cooking breakfast one morning – probably 9 or 10 in the morning – and managed to tip over their stove and set some of their own kit on fire. It was early enough that he had to wake up a couple of the guys – was it even Tom? Or was it Jack and James – doesn’t matter. Anyway, Joe had to get them out of their tent in case the fire spread from next door. It must have been Tom, because he remembers him not looking too happy in T shirt and shorts running out of the tent shouting.

“Put it out! Put it out! Can’t you put it out? You’re supposed to be fire wardens!”

And this bloke from the tent next door had said, “We’re fire wardens at Arcadia. We know how to start fires, not put them out.”

Sure enough Duncan & Alex soon turn up. And Gorgeous George is with them.

“Hello Josephine” screams George, elongating both Os. It’s his standard greeting. Joe sees George’s smiling face. “Alright mate,” he says and reaches across with his right hand to greet his pal. Not to shake his hand, but to pat him on the shoulder. Joe’s standard greeting. George is having none of it. He wraps both arms around Joe, gives him a warm hug, and plants his lips on Joe’s cheek with an exaggerated kiss. They last saw each other two or three days ago, but that won’t stop George from being effusive. “Oh, you look wonderful, my dear,” he says as he steps back and looks straight at Joe. He knows George is lying. Joe is still wearing the stuff he came down in. And he’s sweating. He won’t change until he’s done all of the heavy work.

The rest of the conversation is predictable.

“Good run?” asks Tom

“Not so bad,” says Duncan. “Rain stopped at Basingstoke.”

“Wouldn’t have expected it to find anything worth stopping for,” says Joe.

“When d’you get in?” asks Duncan?

“7:30,” says Tom. Always worth trying Gate C.

Joe makes a mental note. Tom would normally have already told Joe that. Does that mean they’ve settled into non-talking old couple mode? Does Tom expect that Joe has already worked that out? Is Joe overthinking? Yes, probably.

“You got the beers?” asks Alex.

“Not yet – still in the car,” says Tom.

“Fair enough,” says Alex, so he undoes the box on his own trolley and offers a couple of cans to the group. Duncan and Alex have brought all their kit in with them. It means they’ll look after the site while Joe and Tom go and fetch the rest of their kit later in the day. It also means that they feel entitled to sit around, chew the fat, finish their beers, chew some more fat, maybe go and find sommat to eat hoping the tents will be finished by the fairies as they do, then, only then, when they get back maybe finish off pitching the tents. If there’s any pitching left to do.

Tom and Joe want to get everything properly set up, though, so they cajole the lads to finish off the camp construction. They’d nearly finished anyway. At least, done enough. It’s easy when you know what you’re doing. There’s a secret to camping on Pennard. You need your tents in a reasonably tight group so you don’t get gate crashers pitching in the middle of the group. There was that one time, back in the day, when they had a circle of tents and a fire in the middle. Back in the day when lots of folk had camp fires cos you could always find wood down by the railway. They’d left the fire smouldering to go up to the stone circle on the Wednesday night and had come back fairly late on, well late in a normal sense, but early in a Glastonbury sense. They’d come back at 12:00 ish, midnight, to find that someone had pitched their tent right in the middle of their group, right on top of the fire. Joe can remember Tom discussing exactly what to do with the others – whether to leave the tent and risk it melting or worse so the squatters would find out the error of their ways or whether to take it down and risk being accused of theft or vandalism. Fortunately the owners came back right then. Tom did point out the error of their ways, though. They thought he was winding them up until Tom pulled the tent up to show them what was underneath.

Anyway, you get your tents close together. You peg in the guys across most of the gaps so no one can walk between the tents. You leave some space in front so you can put your chairs out and chat comfortably, but not so big as to risk a land grab. Best if you’ve got a couple of tents with awnings that you can merge together like some sort of veranda. You can’t risk a gazebo cos the camp police will give you too much flak. Some groups rope their areas off with that red and white striped plastic tape, but Tom & Joe don’t like that. They prefer to create some sort of gap to allow folk to walk through the group. For one, it’s best to control where people walk cos they’ll walk through your area anyway and usually in the worst way if you don’t guide them. They’ll forever be tripping on the guys, even falling onto the tents and maybe snapping your poles. Second, Tom & Joe enjoy having folk walk through the site. You’ll always have a good natter, hear about some new bands, maybe find out who the secret act on the Park Stage is. Plus you want to get on with your neighbours. It increases the chance that they’ll look out for your stuff while you’re away.

Anyway, they’re done now. The site’s ready. They can put their feet up for a bit before fetching the rest of their stuff. They can catch up with everyone and get excited about the weekend ahead of them.