Festival Season

It’s festival season again. I reach to the back of the cupboard for my daisy boots. Briefly I wonder if I will find a dead mouse lurking in their depths, as I had the previous year with my wellies. Ah, these daisy boots with their furry cuffs: how I love them. 

I consider. 

They are not terribly practical for a muddy arena- more a fashion spectacle than a festival spectacle. We might be lucky with the weather, it has been known. And they are comfortable, and they are me…and they are the only ones I’ve got. What alternative do I have, short of going barefoot over the broken glass and fallen chip forks? They are a better bet than the filigree lace wedges I had bought for summer.

As the days in the calendar tumble to their conclusion, I gather a pile of eccentric ‘must haves’ fro the first weekend of mud and mayhem: boots, a potted marigold, a gold rimmed china rosebed teacup and saucer, a lace edged parasol and a lost tooth I found lying under the sideboard which I hope to have read by the fortune teller. I am preparing for a new role: to be quirky, interesting, outrageous and free. 

When the day comes, I wheel my kit onto the festival sight and look forward to lying out under the stars in sausage villa, my little two-wheel trundle-trolley bed. It unfolds like a concertina sighing songs of the past to me: ‘put on your red shoes and dance the blues’. The past will urge me on: ‘hear your heart out,’ and make dusty memories fresh again.  

As I stumble through the quagmire of a thousand tramplings, the lyrics ‘I can see clearly now, I can se all obstacles in my way’ leap unbidden to my head and make me laugh. I am already wearing the festival sunglasses I got  the previous year and  the outrageous floral decorations work extremely efectively as blinkers. I really can’t see much at all. I may be able to rock the look but I certainly can’t look for rocks!

The relief of finding a pitch is enormous. I settle in and finally relax, determined to expose myself to all the experiences at hand. The breath of a jinx, snow angel happiness and longing explode in my mind in equal amplification. The house of glow worms glints in the gathering gloaming and I breathe it in. It is all rather fine.