I don't really like telling anecdotes where everything goes according to plan. I don't really make plans anyway (because they always go wrong), so I have very few stories of this nature anyway. You've guessed, then, that this is an anecdote where everything seemed to go wrong. I've been working at the festivals this summer with a café/stage, and there've been lots of times when everyone arrived, did their jobs, and despite a few hippy histrionics, Words & Pics: Dani Reddeverything happened as it should have done. But then we decided to go to Wales for a festival called 'Celtic Blue Rock'...

The plan was as follows: a truck, a horsebox, and a jeep pulling a food trailer were going to leave from Glastonbury at four o clock, and get to Wales before it got dark. Then we were all going to set up the structure, decorate it, more people would gradually trickle in - the usual, really.






But this is what actually happened:

We left late. It was nobody's fault, just a combined effort really. I contributed to it by wandering to meet the others and saying, "Where's the caravan with all the stuff in?"

"We're not bringing it."

"But my tent and my mattress and my shoes are in there."

"People asked us to take the important things out, and we took what we could see. Where was your tent?"

"In the cupboard."

"You shoved a tent in a cupboard and expected it to magically arrive in Wales."

"Uh, yep."

Then we realised my boyfriend's tent was broken and we had to run back to the studio and 'borrow' someone else's, whilst bemoaning a lack of bedding and realising he had no clean clothes, and I had no waterproofs and the only jumper I had had shrunk. Which took a little while. But eventually we were on our way, and my boyfriend and I (in that very early stage of courtship where you can be slightly sickening to everyone else) were locked in the back of the truck. It sounds very 'Bastille', but in fact we had a comfy, sheepskin lined sofa, lots of space, and a very decent sound system. We smoked ourselves silly and amused ourselves looking out of the window, which was best when we crossed over the Severn Bridge and the sun was setting. Wales awaited us on the other side, a sodden looking green mass, covered in light mist and telegraph poles. We carried on driving. "Do you know where we're actually going?" I asked the B.F.

"Not a clue."

Then it got dark, and we made a stop at a service station and everyone bought some junk food and grizzled and smoked in the damp. We turned on the stereo inside the truck as loud as we could and danced to Infected Mushroom until the sides were shaking. Then, off again, into the night, and we seemed to keep on driving through tiny little villages. At one point we had to turn round in a housing estate and the length of the vehicle (because a trailer with a large, rusted metal dragon's head was attached) made this very difficult. It was highly amusing for us, but I imagine not so for the person driving. Eventually, it got inky black, and the truck stopped and the door was unlocked and my boss stuck his head inside. "We're completely lost," he informed us. "I can't see a thing. We're going to have to stop in a layby and sleep there overnight". Ironically, the layby we found was right next to a sign saying 'Camping: 150 yards", but we didn't realise that until the morning. "Where's the jeep?" I asked.

"It was meant to be leaving an hour behind us, but now its not leaving until the morning. So hopefully it'll get there early, as it's got pretty much all the food in."

The next day we woke up, cramped from sleeping on floors and in front seats (I had managed to bag the sofa and was fine), and hungry too. The B.F. and I ate a meagre meal of lettuce leaves and a couple of bites of leftover Bavarian cheese, which gave us strange dreams when we napped. Everyone else chain-smoked. We started the trucks and began to wind and rewind through the countryside. Finally, we got there (I still don't actually know where 'there' was geographically located), a small, sodden field. We could see wind turbines on the hill opposite whirling crazily, and we found out that about 20 inches of rain had fallen in the past month, and was falling heavily now. We huddled in the truck and drank coffee and nibbled disconsolately on muesli. My boss told us that he drew a card everyday as a way of divining what was going to occur - today had been 'coyote', the trickster. Somehow he'd managed to get neon yellow paint on his arse and had accidentally smeared it on the sofa. It seemed apt.

We decided to put up the canvas for the main tent. I wish I'd taken photos. I have always thought of our stage as a pirate ship, and putting up the tent felt like we were battling with sails in a storm. The pegs got halfway sucked out the ground with the force, and the poles were flattened into the mud. We all hung on for dear life trying to restrain the canvas as it flapped this way and that, and I'm not exaggerating when I say that people were lifted off the ground. Needless to say, the task proved impossible, so we retired to the truck and bickered about how to do it. Luckily the mood lightened when we found a bag of pasta and a few vegetables that could be knocked up into something edible... and then dipped again with a phone-call.

It was the people in the jeep. "There's been an electrical fault," they told us. "We need you to come and get us."

"Try and sort it out," I replied, being the lovely person I am.

They rang back twenty minutes later. "We've had to stop. Smoke started coming out of the dashboard and all the lights are on. Please come and get us."

"You guys will have to get out of the truck," our boss said, "I'm leaving now"

"But we need to finish cooking. We're nearly done."

Five minutes later he came back.

"Stay there guys, I think I'll take you all with me," and locked the door and started the truck. We sat there slightly dumbfounded, then had to spring to action to prevent the pots and pans and hot food cascading onto the floor.

A journey across Wales to pick up the others, and the food. A journey back. The space in the back of the truck getting increasingly crowded - by now it felt like a house party. It had been cleaned a couple of days earlier, now the floor was patterned with wet mud, piled high with bags, and the air thickened by smoke and the scent of unwashed bodies. One of the problems in the back of the truck was the fact that the door was locked, and people kept on needing the toilet - I guess it's kind of funny to see people in their twenties and thirties reduced to the state of children, banging on a door frantically shouting "I need a pee, I need a pee", but it isn't so funny when it's you.

It got dark again, and we arrived back at the campsite long after the gates should have closed, but they let us in anyway. The truck was parked up, and we were disgorged into a flapping white marquee where we could put up our tents. It was the driest place we could find, but the water still crept inside. We huddled miserably in our ones and twos, and tried to sleep on the uneven ground to the sound of the storm outside (although it is an infinitely preferable sound than two or three colliding bass beats). The next day, nobody wanted to get out of the tents. We stayed in our little bubbles, grumbling softly until our boss pushed open the door of the marquee and squelched inside.

"I've been up for hours debating the pros and cons of doing this festival," he informed us. "Guys, we're going home!"