An extract from my third (and yet untitled) book about our 2014 trip to
the Glastonbury Festival. It's a work in progress, and some of this may
well not make the final cut.
We were travelling by National Express and in this bit, we'd just had a stop on the motorway for a leg stretch on the way down.
We were somewhere on the M5 and it was nearly 6.00 a.m. in the morning....
We left at
exactly 6.00 a.m. The driver wasn’t messing around; apart from a cursory glance
along the coach to see how many people had got back on, that was it. It wasn’t
like one of those school trips when some kid invariably went missing and held
everybody else up, or your summer holiday flights when you get stuck on
the plane waiting for it go while some pissed and overweight
arsehole from Wigan (it’s always Wigan) decides to grace us with their presence. This time
it was “6.00 a.m., you’ve been told and I’m off.” A commendable approach and
one that seemed to have worked. All the seats seemed to be occupied again. From
what I could tell no-one had been left behind. I expected to see someone
running across the car park, chasing the coach and shouting “Get back you
bastard!” as we headed along to the slip road, but it was all empty. The final part
of the journey had begun.
I would have
tried to sleep as well but two things worked against me. It wasn’t the noise in
the coach; most people had taken a leaf out of Thomas’ book and had dropped off
again. The ones that hadn’t simply stared out of the windows, watching the world
(or in reality, the M5) pass by. It was all quiet except for the fact that the
driver had decided that as we were heading to Glasto, it would be appropriate
for us all to have a little blast of wonderful Radio 1 who kindly kept up us
all up to date with the latest news.
It had been
years and years since I’d listened to Radio 1 out of choice, and in fact, by
accident as well. I think that the last time I’d ever turned the dial to 247mw
(it was dials and medium wave back in
the day), then it would have been only to hear the late, great John Peel. Apart from Peel, my Radio 1 days were already
a long way behind me. It had been pure Radio 4 I‘d always
managed to work out an escape route if I got caught anywhere where it was on,
but that morning I was totally trapped.
I had truly
forgotten what a dreadful experience it was. Beyond inane. Way beyond. It was
so mind-numbingly awful. I longed to hear a blast of James Naughtie or John Humphreys
on Today. “Christ,” I muttered to myself, using what was ironically a quite appropriate
term, “even Thought for the Day would be better than this.” I thought it couldn’t
get any worse, yet it did when they started taking live phone calls-at 6.30
a.m. I mean, who can be bothered ringing Radio 1 up at half past sodding six in
the morning?
(All this may
you think that maybe I shouldn’t really have been going to a music festival if
I’d have rather listened to Radio 4 instead of Radio 1. The thought did cross
my mind at the time. Maybe I actually was getting too old for all that malarkey.)
The other thing
that stopped me from falling asleep was that three-shot coffee. I’d finished it
within 15 minutes of getting back on the coach and I didn’t expect to sleep again
much before the following week.
My first Glasto book, "Turn Left at
the Womble: How a 48 year-old Dad Survived his first time at Glastonbury
" is available here:
The follow-up,"Left Again at the
Womble; The adventures of a middle-aged Dad working at the Glastonbury
Festival" is also available here:
