I’m back from Glastonbury – mamaged to get a coach just after seven, was back in London by lunchtime. 

Had a cracking time, thanks to davebushe, rockoctopus, Sandi, Nathan, Ciaran and Jason.  But I am never doing that again.  I’ve never liked camping, and I like it even less when I am, for instance, woken at five am by people doing lines of coke behind my tent, or even more excitingingly, woken at 3am by a bunch of people returning to a tent somewhere nearby in order to party until the sun comes up.  Also, mud is over-rated.

But lest you all think me a miserable old sod (or rather, lest I confirm your view of me) I re-iterate, I had a good time, and I’m glad I went.  A small stack of sublime moments – watching Menlo Park playing the bandstand while drinking a hot spiced cider, and the strange over-shoes that Jason and I bought, that were a pain in the arse, and yet I was still somehow sorry to dispose of them.  Watching Jason unfailingly get a good portion of his crowd on their feet and singing by the end of his set. 

And more: stumbling back to my tent at 1am, only to hear a band playing in a nearby bar, stopping in to check them out on a whim, and ending up buying one of their CDs or the double rainbow over Supergrass as the weather changed from shine to rain to shine in a matter of ten minutes, and y’know, just generally having a reasonably chilled out time. 

Oh, and one of those little moments of perfect beauty that’ll stay with me forever: watching an enormous soap bubble from a child’s bubble sword catching the last rays of the setting sun as it drifted on the breeeze, and seeing it explode into a hundred smaller bubbles lit like fire.  Worth it all on it’s own.

And I think the whole thing has taught me some lessons, which is really all you can hope for out of life.

(I’ve just read that last sentence again.  I think I may have caught something off a hippy while I was there.  If I start talking about peace and love and how we should all be nicer to the planet, man, please have me humanely put down.)

[Edit to add: I cannot be arsed to wade back over that many posts – if you’ve posted anything I need to know about since Wednesday last week, leave a comment pointing me at it.]