Glastonbury Day 5: "There Are Eyeballs In A Tree"

Day 5 found we Glastonbury old hands lying about on our stomachs in our usual Space of Coolness near the toilets in the morning (along with a few usurpers), before peeling off in various directions to enjoy the festival. I was on the 5pm-10pm shift with N. C, L & T had a different shift which fortunately finished at 8pm, so all of us did the Dance of Going To See Muse Tonight, Yay, again in the interests of good luck, before heading off to the Pyramid Stage to see the Lightning Seeds. I seem to remember it was on this occasion that we learned more about each other’s sexual preferences than any of us ever needed to know (alcohol wasn’t involved at this time in the morning, so I know not why the conversation took a turn that involved the phrase “hair-pulling”), and also the following discussion as we passed the cow barns on the way in:

L: I think the cows are talking to me.
C: Really?
L: MOOOO.
Cow from inside the barn: MOOOOOOO!!!!
L: You see?
Me: You’re like the Cow Whisperer.

We settled ourselves in at a comfortable spot towards the back of the field. The great thing about the Pyramid Stage is that the visuals and audio are pretty good from just about everywhere, so if you don’t fancy being in the squash at the front, you can occupy the “picnic” bit at the back of the field, where people spread themselves out with blankets, chairs, and four-packs of Carlsberg. Or, in our case, frosty lemonades and iced coffee – we really were far too respectable. Iced coffee from the stall near the Pyramid Stage was fast becoming my favourite thing, and if you know me, you’ll know that for it to be too hot for me to drink liquid coffee means it was pretty fricken’ hot.

We sprawled about all over the field, basking in the sunshine. Then jumped up and down to “Three Lions” and “Life of Riley”. Then sat down again, because it was roasting. Now I like the heat, and am famed among my friends for feeling the cold if there’s a stiff breeze. Indeed, one of my colleagues at work once dubbed me “The Lizard” for my ability to sit around in the warmth, but this was pushing it, even for me. People were hiding in any bit of shade they could find. After the Lightning Seeds finished, we went our separate ways to see the different bits of the festival we were interested in. I went off to catch one of the bands at the West Holts (ex- Jazz World) Stage, then hide from the sun inside tents. Specifically, the Cabaret Tent, where I was about to fufil a six-year-old Glastonbury personal tradition.

I was at the Cabaret Stage to see the punk performance poet, Attila the Stockbroker. Attila was the first act I ever saw at Glastonbury, back in 2005. I was trudging along in the mud past a tent, when I heard a song with the memorable refrain: “Aneurin Bevin, your party is dead / And the time for a new one is nigh / Will the last person left please turn off the lights? / New Labour, just fuck off and die.” I promptly wheeled left, and became a fan of Attila the Stockbroker. I now always check the line-up to see if I can get to his show, and this year my luck held; he was on at 3pm. I settled in early to avoid the sun and stake out my spot.

Whilst in the Cabaret Tent, I also got to see the Great Glastonbury Filling The Tent Trick. It was impressive. As the previous act (a middle-aged man in a kilt doing diablo tricks) trotted off, the compere decided the crowd was not impressive enough for Attila the Stockbrocker, and announced: “Right everyone, we’re going to do the Glastonbury Filling the Tent Trick. This always works. Trust me. Right now I want all the people at the back to stand up, stand up, yes that’s right, don’t worry, you’ll get to sit back down again soon, so just go stand at the back and fill the entrances. That’s right, fill the entrances right up so that it looks like the entire tent is standing room only, that’s it, excellent. And now, when I raise my arms, I want you all to clap and cheer as if the most exciting thing you’ve ever seen in your life is on stage, Really raise the roof. That’s it. Right, one-two-three… Yes! Excellent! Keep going, keep going, it’s working, even louder please, even louder, that’s it, the people are coming in – make room for them, folks! Make room! Fantastic!”

He was right; it did work. Drawn by the magnetic urge to see what all the fuss is about and the fear that you might be missing a good time, people packed themselves into the tent, and Attila came onstage to see a full tent, which waved back at him. He ran through his list of favourites: “Libyan Students from Hell”, “Doggy on a String” and the song with the afore-mentioned chorus, “Guy Fawkes’ Table”. You can always tell when people in the tent have never seen him perform it before; they’re the ones who gape with surprise at the chorus, then laugh, then cheer. As his set ended, I reluctantly assumed the perpendicular, and dragged myself off to the beer tent to get on with my shift.

There’s not a lot to say about the shifts at Glastonbury this year, which is a good thing. You show up, you push beer over the counter at people, you throw the cash in the bucket, you repeat. Ours was, as previously observed, a very good and well-run bar to work in. The only challenge was that for some reason people would enter the tent at one end and form a queue there, rather than spreading out down the bar where there were more people to serve them. Being an insanely helpful type, I developed a Village People-style routine where, whenever this happened, I went up to that end and yelled “Folks, please move down inside the tent – we are waiting to serve you at the other end!” then did a sort of Mexican wave indicating the general direction of the people waiting to serve.

By and large, the punters at Glastonbury at our tent were good people. This is something I’ve observed on many occasions; I’ve no idea what working in a bar on a professional basis is like, but by and large, the Glastonbury punters are fairly easygoing. I was happy this year not to be in the Dance Field. The Dance Field is probably my least favourite bit of the festival; it is not my scene, and probably has a higher proportion of drink- / drug- casualties who are still up and perambulating around than anywhere else in the festival. (We used to call the 11am-5pm Sunday shift on the bar in the Dance Field the “zombie shift” because of the appearance of anyone who staggered into it at that time.)

By contrast, our bar was cheerful and, being next to the Pyramid Stage, had the best live soundtrack ever. It’s a funny thing about Glastonbury. We are all so used to hearing music in the background that at first, the sound of “Time to Pretend” or “I Don’t Feel Like Dancing” playing nearby doesn’t strike you as remarkable; then you look up and realise that, actually, you’re hearing MGMT or Scissor Sisters playing it live. As the slogan has it: “If Carlsberg did live bar music…”

I was sorry to miss seeing Scissor Sisters, as they were on before Muse, but my shift clashed. At least I got to hear them, albeit through the tent wall. Fortunately, I was going to get to see Muse.

If you know me, you’ll know that Muse are pretty much my favourite band, ever. I have seen them live once before at the Metro Radio Arena in Newcastle, but whilst that was fantastic, there’s something about the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury that seems to add an extra dimension to the artists’ performance. Probably, it’s the knowledge that a fair part of their audience did not pay for their ticket specifically so that they could see them, and is standing there thinking: “Go on then, impress me”. To say that I was bouncing up and down a bit as the clock ticked towards 10pm would be accurate.

Fortunately for N and I, Muse were on in the field next to us at 10.15pm. As soon as we finished (and you’d better believe we were in the queue for signing off the work rota and collecting our shift vouchers about 9.55pm), we tore out of the tent, made the fastest change into our non-work clothes ever, then took off towards our rendezvous with L, C, & T like heat-seeking missiles. Amazingly, we found them, and threaded our way through the MASSIVE crowd to the best spot we could find. Annoyingly, it had a guy behind us who apparently believed that Muse’s light show really needed him to point his green laser pointer at the top of the Pyramid Stage as an interesting addition. Sadly, he was not near enough behind us that I could “accidentally” tread on his foot.

All this was forgotten when Muse strutted on stage like returning heroes. (I’m sorry, this is the point in this blog where my objectivity is temporarily absent – I apologise if I sound like a cross between a fangirl and a sleep-deprived NME reporter, normal sarcastic service WILL be resumed further down this blog when Muse have gone offstage.) Matt Bellamy looked out at the crowd and muttered into the mike “Fucking hell, this is massive!”, and, in the words of the NME’s reporter, “did his best not to look like a man who plays to 25,000-capacity stadiums every day of his working week. (He does. He so does.) But yeah, maybe this one’s a little bit special…”.

Not just for the obvious reason, which is that the Glastonbury Saturday headline slot on the Pyramid is the “you have made it to the big league” signifier. If you’re a fan of Muse, this had a special resonance. Muse’s first performance on the Sunday of the festival on the Pyramid Stage back in 2004 is widely regarded as being the moment they entered rock’s big league and made it into the “you might have heard of them” mainstream. Unfortunately, it was also followed by one of the band’s worst moments, when their drummer Dominic Howard’s father collapsed and died of a heart attack half an hour after watching his son’s band on the main stage. Whether Muse would ever play Glastonbury again was something of a hushed question among their fans. To see them back on the stage was an emotional experience.

Then they opened up with “Knights of Cydonia”, and the crowd went ballistic. At this point I can really only say that I enjoyed the whole gig immensely (with the exception of Annoying Green Pointer Guy). For me Muse on top form + Glastonbury on a summer’s evening = perfect musical experience. Hearing “Guiding Light” live was a particular highlight for me, it’s one of my favourites from “The Resistance”. I also think that Matt Bellamy may actually have said more to the audience whilst onstage than at just about any gig I’ve seen footage of. He is notorious for saying very little to the audience other than “Hello, how are you doing?”, then ripping into “Plug In Baby” or “Stockholm Syndrome”, apparently out of the feeling that the audience is there to see him play rather than listen to him talk. (Possibly correct, although I think the Saturday evening audience would have been quite receptive to tales of aliens taking over the world in disguise.) Seeing him actually smile at the audience and say hello was quite a nice moment.

Then, of course, it was back to “Hysteria” and “Supermassive Black Hole”, and the party continued until Muse finally capped an excellent, excellent performance by bringing the Edge on stage and concluding with “Where the Streets Have No Name”. I’d like to say I don’t need other people to validate my taste, but when you have a favourite band, and when you get to see that favourite band demonstrate their brilliance to 40,000 people plus the watching media, it’s a very, very nice moment.

As the field very slowly emptied, we headed for our rendezvous at the Bread and Roses pub nearby. The Bread and Roses is another WBC bar, and highly popular due to the fact that it was the only bar in the main festival area that took WBC end-of-shift drinks vouchers. In the old days, any WBC bar would take them in exchange for a drink, which made being a volunteer somewhat more fun. Indeed, I don’t think I paid for a drink during the entirety of my first festival back in 2005 (people would just hand over the drink and grin “Nah, don’t bother” at you when you proffered the voucher), which is, of course, why the WBC no longer does things this way.

It does mean that the Bread and Roses is the default off-duty bar for WBC workers, and it was packed that night. We found each other, found some drinks and, after quickly making some new friends, found some seating in, around and on one of the very elderly sofas in the bar. Suddenly, Alabama 3 wandered onstage and started singing. We’d reached the point in the festival where this sort of thing had become the norm. Due to my alcohol intake, I actually cannot remember a great many details of their performance, except that a) I enjoyed it and b) at one point they were singing a slow country and western dirge when suddenly the lead singer yelled “Nah, you don’t wanna hear any more of this sad country and western shit!”, stopped the song halfway through and broke into a much livelier singalong song, to wild cheers from the (largely drunk) audience.

At this point, a debate occurred within the team. We’d talked early about going to see a band recommended in the Guardian Guide to the Festival, the Phenomenal Handclap Band in the Dance East tent, introduced by Craig Charles. Some of us were still up for this, but others were fading fast. After a slightly intense debate, myself and T decided that no, we actually weren’t too tired to go watch them. We staggered on out of the tent and rambled over to the Dance Field, stopping for a much-needed pee on the way. We were merrily rambling onward towards the music tent when, from a young woman nearby, there came an ear-piercing screech: “THERE ARE EYEBALLS IN A TREE!”

I turned to look, and very nearly jumped behind T and yelled “GAAHH!” Because there were, indeed, giant eyeballs in a nearby tree, which is quite a freaky sight when you aren’t expecting it. We stared at them for several minutes, wondering why on earth anyone had put eyeballs in a tree. The only conclusion we could come up with was that someone at Glastonbury hates the inhabitants of the Dance Field with a vengeance, and decided to put up something that would give anyone in an altered state paranoid visions for the rest of the festival. If this was so, I can understand their motivation (see my earlier comments for why).

We made it to the tent, and the band were on, and hugely popular (it looked like everyone else had read the Guardian Guide, too). The tent was jumping with happy people in costumes clutching drinks and glowy light sticks, and we merged into the crowd, pausing only so that T could get her photo taken with a young man and his girlfriend who’d come dressed as “Where’s Wally?” and his girlfriend Wallette. We drank, we waved our hands in the air, we jumped around, and when the band finished at half three in the morning, we weaved our merry way back home, having a good-natured drunken debate with two lads in a similar state of inebriation, about something which I entirely cannot remember. I couldn’t remember it the morning afterwards either – it’s not the passage of time to blame. Quite possibly the best single day I’ve ever had at the Glastonbury festival. What was to happen next?

Winter Comes

The wind howls around the corridors, nibbling at the office workers.
The stripy jumper is fetched from the back of the wardrobe.
The puddles glint, and the bicycle takes corners more slowly instead of being flung around them with gay abandon.
The latest Silly Hat Trend appears upon the heads of students, and at the stall that sells Smelly Balls outside the Northumberland Street branch of Dixons.
Hat and gloves become an automatic reflex, and Doc Martens cease to peep shyly from beneath the bed, and stomp merrily about the streets, insulating their owners’ feet.
Christmas decorations cease to become a source of vague it’s-too-damn-early-we’ve-not-even-had-Halloween-yet irritation, and instead a reminder of joys to come.
Hot chocolate becomes a necessity not a luxury.
Women don their skimpiest clothing for going out at the coldest time of the year.
The populace scoff currywurst and slurp mulled wine whilst contemplating buying a sponge soap and a trapper’s hat from the Continental market.
Marks and Spencers devotes its attention to fattening the populace now, that it may sell them diet ready meals in the New Year.
Winter comes to Newcastle.

Glastonbury Day 4: "Play Something We Know!"

Day 4 dawned hot and sunny, again. We had our morning routine worked out by now: arise, open tent / crawl out of tent, get up and shower whilst there was no queue (if feeling organised), kip no. 2, awake, eat breakfast together, gather in the shady spot. T, C and L had done sterling work and found the only really cool spot in the entire WBC campsite. It was in the shade of the toilet block, but we didn’t particularly care, since there was no smell, a nice breeze, and it was a big enough patch of shadow to hold all of us. We settled in for a natter before we all decamped to watch Rolf Harris officially open Glastonbury 2010 on the Pyramid Stage.

The heat, the heat… it felt like walking through an oven. And in answer to the obvious, yes, I preferred it to staggering around in mud and having to pull on a full set of wellies and waterproofs in the morning before I could go for a pee, but a dusty field with little shade and no nearby water to jump into to cool off in isn’t that much fun, either.

On the other hand, I was easily distracted by C’s incessant complaining about Rolf Harris. For almost the entire 20 minute walk, he kept up a running monologue of “I’m not going to see Rolf Harris. Rolf Harris is crap. Why do you want to see him? Why are we doing this? This is stupid.” All the while being pulled along by L, who was refusing to give him any choice whatsoever in the matter. The “almost” is because at one point we encountered a woman who may have been a survivor of the original Glastonbury festival in 1973 (I’m not trying to be uncharitable here, but it kinda looked like that) and who was wandering about topless, and this stunned us all into silence.

I brought up the rear, hoping vaguely to find a stall selling sachets of suncream. Not giving yourself backache at Glastonbury involves a fine judgement of carrying precisely what you need for the whole day (to prevent unnecessary-foot-aching journeys back to the tent), but only what you need (to prevent throwing your back out). I wanted some suncream I could stick in the top pocket of my shirt, but alas none was forthcoming, so I decided to go for Option B, and just nick suncream from other people as and when I needed it.

We arrived at the Pyramid Stage to find a massive field full of people wearing straw hats and shorts, excitedly awaiting the arrival of an octogenerian Antipodean. I was actually caught in the Great Rolf Harris Crush of 2009, when the organisers foolishly put him on the Jazz World (now the West Holts) Stage, and huge queues of people clogged the pathways surrounding the field. We turned around and went back, because it was obvious we would get nowhere near the stage, and I reflected on the fact that only at Glastonbury would you see people forming a massive queue to see Rolf Harris play the digeridoo.

Sensibly, this year the organisers had put him on the Pyramid Stage and made him the festival opener. As we arrived and fought our way into the crowd, Rolf opened up with a blast on the digeridoo, and a cheerful insult for a member of the stage crew who failed to throw him a bottle of water: “You could play cricket for England, mate!”. Rolf went through all the classics: “Jimmy My Boy”, “The Ladies at the Court of King Caractacus”, “Tie Me Kangeroo Down”, “Waltzing Matilda” and, of course, “Two Little Boys”. I recently learned that “Two Little Boys” was inspired by the death on the battlefield of Rolf Harris’s brother during WWII. Apparently his father was in a different regiment, and believed for the rest of his life that, had he only been in the same regiment, he could have pulled his brother to safety, just as in the song. When Rolf Harris played “Two Little Boys” to his grandmother, she listened all the way through, then said at the end “Please, never play that to me again”.

I didn’t know this at the time, so I simply joined in the communal singalong. So did C. I have a hilarious video of the five of us boogieing along to Rolf singing “Waltzing Matilda”. And yes, we did get him to admit afterwards that he’d enjoyed it. We had different shifts and different things we wanted to see, so the five of us went our separate ways and planned to meet later for a drink.

As the day wore on, the heat became increasingly oppressive. I took shelter from it in the Circus Tent. Always a favourite of mine at Glastonbury – there’s so much more to the festival than the music stages. This turned out not to be so much a tent as a communal sauna. Fortunately, I’d been at Glastonbury for over three days now, and was sufficiently in the festival mindset that lying about in a tent clad only in sweat, my bra and some shorts, in the presence of lots of strangers seemed like an entirely rational response to the situation. (I did keep my bra on though – I wasn’t feeling that relaxed).

At 2pm, mine and N’s six-hour shift started. An experience I can best compare to serving beer in a canvas sauna. At least we had access to drinks and ice, and as the afternoon worn on, the heat slowly bled from the day, reaching the ideal point around 6pm. From there it began to drop cooler and cooler. After a certain amount of experimentation, I’d found the ideal combination of stuff to take with me to the tent. As the shift ended, on went the leggings under shorts, long-sleeved t-shirt, jacket, and socks under sandals. (Yes, I know. Fashion faux pas. We’re in a field, who gives a fuck?)

Also as the shift ended, off went N and I in search of some decent food. We found it at a nearby Thai Curry stall which had apparently won lots of festival food awards. We wandered off in search of seats, and found some in front of the bar we’d been working in. Which was, conveniently, in front of the Cider Bus.

It was also, less conveniently, next to a passed-out drunk slumped on a bench, whom N preferred not to sit near. I wondered what it said about me that my eye had scanned Passed-Out Guy and decided he posed no threat. And yes, that’s heartless, but what could I have done for him? Put him in the recovery position? Woken him up? Either would probably have resulted in cursing and vomit, and I wasn’t wearing wellies. Instead, I thoughtfully ate my curry, and listened to Dizzee Rascal on the Pyramid Stage. N not being a fan of Mr Mills, we went off in search of more tuneful music on the nearby bandstage, then headed back to the Pyramid Stage to see Gorillaz headline.

Ah, Gorillaz’s headline set… Mmm. It’s a tricky one. If you’ve ever read any of the reviews for it, you’ll know that it was not widely regarded as a success.

Which in some ways is a shame. There was a lot of anticipation before the Pyramid stage that evening, and when screens came on to show Snoop Dogg rapping “Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach”, cheers came from across the field. I remember the first twenty minutes of the set as being pretty damn good, maybe not in the very highest bracket for a Glastonbury set, but definitely up around the four-star mark, as the band went through the first half of “Plastic Beach”. Damon Albarn swapping between piano and lead vocals to sing “Rhinestone Eyes” was a particular highlight, seeing Bobby Womack join in on “Stylo” was amazing, and when they played “Melancholy Hill”, it was one of those moments where you hear a song for the first time and instantly fall in love with it. When it happens in the middle of a field in the evening, surrounded by thousands of other people, it is the sort of transcendent experience that causes newspaper music reviewers to reach for the phrase “Glastonbury Moment”.

And then things started to unravel. Now, I actually admire Damon Albarn’s determination not to give the public what they want, which takes some balls if you’re the opening day headliner at just about the biggest music festival in the UK calendar. However, I question the wisdom of doing this by employing the Syrian National Flute and Drum Orchestra (I think) to play a musical interlude for what felt like about 15 minutes, which is far too long when you’re in front of a crowd wanting hit songs to sing along to. Rightly or wrongly, that’s what the Pyramid Stage is about, and I couldn’t help wondering if Gorillaz might actually have worked better on the Other Stage, where the crowd is a wee bit more alternative and open-minded. The Pyramid Stage crowd wanted songs they knew, or at the very least, songs they could jump around to. As the Guardian’s music critic put it: “There is a time and place for spotlighting virtuosos in unfamiliar disciplines but this emphatically is not it”.

As the show continued, it became painfully obvious that Gorillaz didn’t, quite, have the big repertoire of songs to draw on to fill the entire slot. I think people would probably have still been happy, though, if they’d stuck to a set of continual pop songs with an ever-changing line-up of People Who Are Famous Enough That You Know Them, like Lou Reed – watching him onstage alongside Damon Albarn, Mick Jones and Paul Simon was one for the rock geeks. “Dare” was a highlight, too, but unfortunately its very popularity only pointed up the fact that people were jumping around because they knew it, and once it was finished, they went back to going “Huh?” at the stage. Particularly at what I remember as being one of the most painful moments to watch, “Plastic Jet”.

“Plastic Jet” is a song about… well, it’s not 100% clear from the lyrics, but in the context of the whole album, it’s about alienation from the natural world and wasting our resources (or something along those lines). I seem to remember watching the band sing it against a backdrop of some of the goriest footage of whales being slaughtered that I ever hope not to have to see again. Damon Albarn then tried to get the crowd to learn the chorus and sing along.

Since the chorus is: “It’s all good news now / Because we left the taps running / For a hundred years / So drink from the cup / The plastic cup, drink / Drink to the purple, the people / The plastic-eating people”, this was not destined to go well. Some of us did give it our best shot, but it was actually quite painful to watch Damon Albarn wheedling “Oh come on, please?” to a crowd who were clearly not up for it – especially if you, like me, had been there when he broke down in tears at the overwhelming warmth and support from the crowd when Blur headlined on Sunday night last year.

The next high point came when Albarn and the Japanese artist Little Dragon sang an exceptionally lovely ballad together, which would later cause me to scratch my head in bewilderment at why on earth Albarn cursed one of the most romantic songs he’s ever written with the godawful title, “To Binge”. For me, the high point after that was the tribute to the recently-deceased Dennis Hopper, “Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head”.

Now, my tastes in music are weird, and I usually like the tracks on albums which nobody else likes. “Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head” is a spoken-word parable of environmental catastrophe on Gorillaz’s second album, “Demon Days”, with Dennis Hopper providing the narration. Spooky and compelling, it was a real treat for me – but not, alas, for the two men standing next to me, who yelled “Play a song!” “Play something we know!” at the stage, and voiced the desires of many.
Albarn apparently heard their call and answered it, as Gorillaz ended their set with their biggest two songs, “Feel Good Inc” and “Client Eastwood”, with Snoop Dogg joining in on the rap sections in “Client Eastwood”. Mollified, the crowd got on down and boogied, ending on a happy note, although later on the way back to the village campsite, C and I would compare notes and agree that it was a shame he didn’t use the original rap from the song. I guess when you’re a Big Star you want to put your own stamp on things, but the rap in “Client Eastwood” is what people were wanting to hear, and it was a bit of a shame not to get the original lyrics. Still, it was a good first day to the festival. And the pints of beer and cider in the Village bar that ended it were very welcome. Onward to Day Five…

"Gordon, Don't Be Such A Dickhead" (Taxi Survey)

Yet again, the Taxi Survey rolleth around. This time around, happily, I was not involved in organising it.

I say happily because, whilst responsibility gives me a strange feeling of being worthwhile, it is also a large source of stress. Having forty-odd (not forty odd – well, hopefully not…) people standing out in the cold on the busy streets of Newcastle at night counting taxis inevitably has health and safety considerations (not least where on earth you go to pee).

The Taxi Survey, for the uninitiated, is a survey run by many local authorities in varying forms. The intention is to measure the supply and demand of “black cab” taxis in the city at the busiest times of a typical week. (NB this are the “hackney carriage” types of taxi which are allowed to pick up on the street, not private hire cabs, which can’t.)

You do this by having people with clipboards stand out on the street at the city centre’s taxi ranks between 10.30pm to 4am on a Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and count both the taxis and the people waiting for them, and how long both groups wait. Data geeks (like me) then feed this data into the computer to measure the supply and demand. To get the data, however, there’s no getting away from standing on the street, counting the taxis.

In previous years, I have been in the “Roving Car” which travels between the different taxi ranks to check that everyone is alright, has enough forms, knows what they’re doing, decides when the rank is so quiet that people can go home, etc. This is a fairly hefty responsibility, since you’re on call to sort out any problems both on the night and for the entire afternoon and evening before it, when you have to sort out replacements for people who drop out with flu / arthritis / sick dogs. Fortunately, I had my driver and wingman, Bob, for company. We got along very well, circling the city like a municipal version of Starsky and Hutch, occasionally pausing in a late-night café to drink bad coffee and discuss the meaing of life, the Glastonbury Festival, and Bob’s tattoos.

This year, running the survey has passed from my team to the other research team, so I was a grunt this year, just standing out on the street counting the taxis. Or sitting in my (work) partner P’s very large SUV, watching from there. P turned out to be a fellow scuba diver, so we had much to talk about as we sat on the side of the Haymarket Bus Station, watching the scanty supply of taxis hang around in the vain hope of a fare.

P told me an amusing story, as we watched the drunks stagger about. He was not a big drinker, and this apparently dated back to a time when, as a young man, he had been out drinking with his friends in the town, and been found by the police wandering down Grainger Street wearing a traffic cone on his head and singing “The Sun Has Got His Hat On”. The policeman who found him took him to the station, put him in a cell with a bucket and some water, and left the door unlocked. The following morning, he came back in and said: “Right, consider that your warning. Do that again and the door will be locked and you’ll be up in front of the beak the next morning”.

P heeded this advice and did not get heavily drunk again. Later on in life, he became a fireman. Those of you who know the layout of Newcastle’s city centre will know that the old fire station and police station are next to each other on Pilgrim Street. P was based at Pilgrim Street, and they once received a call from the police station over the road. A female arrestee had smuggled some cigarettes and matches into her cell (I’ll leave it to your imaginations how, gentle readers) and either accidentally or deliberately set fire to her mattress.

Apparently it was the shortest response time in the station’s history, as they simply ran the hose from one building to the other to put the fire out. P did get some funny looks, though, as he looked around at the fire and reminsced “Ah yes, this used to be my cell….”

Since Prudhoe Place taxi rank closes at 12.30, we were redeployed each night to go and relieve people who had been standing on their feet in the cold for several hours. This meant, of course, that we were standing in the cold instead. Fortunately, I normally dress for the Taxi Survey as if I'm about to climb Ben Nevis in the middle of winter. Thickly armoured against the cold (including the hiking boots which I originally bought four years ago for the second time I did the Taxi Survey - I've been living in Newcastle longer than I think), we stood out on Collingwood Street and in the bus stop near the Gate, watching the drunks stagger about and listening to the busker stood near the Gate taxi rank.

Some of our fellow counters weren't fans of the busker, but I rather admired her. It takes a certain stamina to stand out on the street from 11pm-3am singing Katy Perry and Bruno Mars songs without a break (I did at one point wonder if she was wearing an adult nappy), not to mention a high tolerance for singing drunks joining in on the chorus.

Collingwood Street was somewhat calmer, and certainly had fewer people in fancy dress, but it did seem to have a higher proportion of the very heavily drunk. I'm probably getting boring and old, but I really don't quite understand how people can get themselves so drunk they actually fall asleep in doorways in Newcastle in the rain. Anything could happen to them, from muggers to people wanting to play human Buckaroo. Though I did at one point see a man lying there for 15 minutes joined by two other men, who had apparently never seen him before, who woke him, propped him up, and spent half an hour persuading him to get a taxi home, which I thought very noble of them since they weren't wearing coats and it was chucking it down. Apparently humanity is not completely dead in Newcastle.

As for the title of this post, it comes from our observations on the Bigg Market last Thursday. Being sat in a parked car pretty much makes you invisible. I hummed the opening lines of “National Express” by the Divine Comedy, as we watched the young lads and lasses carrying on. One young woman yelled loudly to a nearby male “I don’t know if I know you or not!”. Shortly afterwards, the two of them knew each other much better, at least well enough for him to spend time checking if her bum was where he expected it to be. Another young woman and her partner engaged in a lengthy argument about who was going home with home, resulting in her uttering the quote which begins this post.

Funnily enough, it didn’t put me off drinking.

Dancing at the Monument (Alive After Five)

And as I rode home from the gym one cold Monday evening in November in Newcastle, I paused to see three dancers clad in feathered headdresses and elaborate costumes dancing to reggae at the Monument.

People nearby paused in their shopping. Cyclists slowed to a stop and hopped off. Young men nervously joined in with the dancing.

Sadly, I did not get a photo of the elderly chap playing the music joining in, but I think this one captures it quite well.

Swamp Thing (Dive at Lake Ellerton)

Today I dove for the first time in Lake Ellerton, fondly (yeah right) known as "The Swamp" to those who frequently dive there.

Its name is not entirely unapt. There are a few interesting things to see down there: some concrete pipes to swim through (fun for testing buoyancy control), a few sunken boats with Barbie dolls tied to them, several platforms, ropes to guide you from place to place, the fabled Pike of Ellerton (I caught a glimpse of a silver flash buggering off into the distance today, which may have been it), and apparently a sunken caravan, which I did not find. But it is also silty, filled with waterweed, and has bugger-all life that I managed to see apart from some water fleas.

It was good to be back under the water. I like to dive new sites, and I felt the need to get in one more dive in the UK before we start to reach the end of the season. This was dive no. 59 for me - yay! I have to say though, that whilst it was interesting, it will never be my favourite dive site. It was truly perishingly cold. My computer recorded a temperature of 5 degrees C, always interesting when you are wearing a semidry suit with a suggested temperature range of 10-20 degrees. I had a rash vest on underneath, but even so... drysuit, here I come.

This was my longest dive in waters this cold, and if my buddy hadn't realised that he was following the wrong line at the moment when he did, he was about to receive a very emphatic "I am cold, let's turn round" signal, followed by me heading towards the jetty with all the speed I can muster whilst wearing ~30kg of dive gear.

One thing I will say in Ellerton's favour. The showers are very, very warm.

Shiny Things, Shiny Things, Shiny Things (NEC Dive Show)

Or in other words, I went to the National Dive Show last Saturday, where I bought stuff (but not too much), tried out a breathing exercise with the Notanx Freedivers, drank a few shots of free rum, and tried out a closed-circuit rebreather. (Not, I hasten to add in that order.)

The rebreather was interesting. A bit frustrating. I'd have liked to see how it felt to swim with it on. Unfortunately you couldn't put fins on in the trial pool, and trying to push that much gear through the water without fins gave an interesting insight into what it would be like to be a turtle on its back. Other than that, it was interesting.

More long posts coming soon as and when I get chance to write them.

Back from the Red Sea

Where I went for a happy solo week of shore diving. Saw lots of fish, slept lots, ate lots, dived lots, made new friends and drank much Sakara beer. More coming soon. Here's a nice picture of a lionfish:

Glastonbury Day 3, Thursday: “You Don’t Like To Complain About the Sunshine, But….”

Day 3 dawned, and the heat still continued. Better prepared for it this time, I staggered out of the tent at 6am, went for the usual semi-conscious first pee of the day, staggered back, shed most of my sleeping clothes, threw my arm over my eyes, and fell back to dozing on top of the sleeping bag. Three hours later, I awakened and wandered off to join the others for breakfast. One of our neighbours who L and C had kept amused with their bickering last night commented to me “They’re just like a married couple”. I agreed – they kept arguing all the time and never had sex. (C was sweetly devoted to his lady, and L was madly infatuated with her new boyfriend.)

It was immediately obvious that treating L’s hayfever was going to have to take priority, as her eyes were red and she could barely see. We gathered our worldly goods and wandered down the increasingly familiar dirt track from the WBC village to the festival site. We were in a good location this time, with the road from our campsite leading straight onto the Railway Track – the main road through the festival site. Fortunately, the medical centre was immediately inside the site.

Unfortunately, they were not able to help very much, instructing us to go to the pharmacy and buy eye drops. We headed off yet again in search of the elusive pharmacy. I reflected on the fact that you’d think the only pharmacy serving a festival site the size of Sunderland would be better signposted and marked on the map. L was really suffering, it was roastingly hot, and it was not the most fun walk I’ve ever had through the Festival. We eventually found it (it was one field beyond where N and I had stopped looking the night before, annoyingly), and purchased the strongest eyedrops they had for sale. T appointed herself L’s nurse: “Put them in your eyes, right now. And don’t rub them. No, don’t rub them. You’ll need to put them in again tonight, even if you don’t feel like it. And don’t rub them!”

We split up to go our separate ways and have a wander before the festival started. I bought a handbag, and wandered to the Green Fields, where I went for an explore. I do love the Green Fields; they are, by far, my favourite part of the festival. Peaceful, devoted to healing and the earth, not filled with drunken wasters. If the entire festival consisted just of the Green Fields, I could probably spend a weekend there quite happily. Then again, you could easily split Glastonbury into four or five separate festivals. The sheer scale of the place takes some getting used to.

I quite fancied a massage, but all the therapists were booked up, so I went and sat in a meditation tent until peaceful harmony reigned in my world. After the stress of the last half a year, I needed to calm down a bit. Refreshed, I made my usual pilgrimage up to the top of the site; the Stone Circle and Viewing Field. I seem to remember that the Stone Circle is not actually very old – it’s a modern circle – but it looks impressive and is always surrounded by people lounging around. I wandered along, then crossed across to the Viewing Field and took some panoramic shots of the site in the sunshine, then strolled on down to start my first shift of the Festival at 5pm.

Ah, to be back behind the WBC bar… the memories came flooding back. Some were good; the time we got the main stage bar at Leeds festival, so had a frontline view of all the acts even when we were serving. Some were bad; the time I did my first-ever shift behind a WBC bar in the now-defunct Jazz Café bar at Glastonbury 2005. We were an hour late due to the mud slowing things now and the bar being incredibly well-hidden, the floods had knocked out the electric beer and cider pumps, and the water seeping into the tent had produced conditions behind the bar that led some people to compare it to trying to serve beer in the trenches. (Except, you know, without the rats, the disease, the German snipers, the poison gas and the general fear of dying a horrible death at any moment, so basically not really like being in the trenches at all.)

Some were infuriating; the time we worked an extra shift on our first day at Leeds festival until 2 in the morning, with a manager whom we found apparently completely and lying down in the staff rest area. Some were life-changing; the first time I heard Muse play live at Leeds 2006… I really have been doing this for a while.

From the start, it was obvious that the Village Inn was going to be a joy to work behind. The management team were fantastic. (Not just my opinion – many people posted on the WBC Servers Facebook page to say so!). They were supportive, they kept the bars stocked up, they worked hard, and peace and love reigned all around. Except for the people who we had to ask for ID. I hate this part of the job as I am notoriously rubbish at guessing people’s ages. On the other hand, it can be amusing. I still remember the time when I asked a young lad for ID at last year’s Glastonbury, and he presented me with a “national ID card”. I adopted my solemn face and muttered “I’ll have to see the manager”. (Actually, I didn’t need to, but when you know you’re going to have to take someone’s ID, it’s as well to pre-empt the “I want to talk to the manager” line of argument.) We both had a laugh, then I returned to inform him of the decision.

Me: I’m sorry, we’re going to have to confiscate this.
Him: Why?
Me: It’s not a valid form of ID. Britain doesn’t have identity cards. (Inside my head: “And even if it did, that isn’t how you spell ‘Parliament’.”)

He wandered off looking as though he was on the verge of tears. I probably shouldn’t have enjoyed that. Then again, most people who try to get served underage probably don’t much care about landing the person who serves them with an £80 fine. I certainly didn’t when I was roaming Wakefield’s Westgate Run aged 16 getting pissed in the pubs…

The shift ran smoothly, with the only problem being the heat. It was incredibly hot inside the tent, and I tried not to think about what it was going to be like in the full heat of the day for the 2pm shift tomorrow. The phrase “sauna with beer” jumped to mind. It was already becoming apparent that if “Dunkirk spirit” was the catchphrase of the 2005 and 2007 festivals, “You don’t like to complain about the sunshine, but…” would be the catchphrase of 2010. As you walked around the site, you could already see people starting to colonise every available bit of shade. Trees, hedges, even bins – their shadows were filled with pink festivalgoers panting like dogs. I suppose I should have been grateful for small mercies since, although the bar was very near the toilets, there was, thank God, no smell.

N was knackered after his shift, but I wanted to go for a wander rather than return to the WBC canteen tent and drink. I’ve got nothing against drinking in the WBC canteen tent, but we’d been doing it for two nights on the trot and I fancied a change of scene. I strolled off to look for excitement, and ended up in the Queen’s Head, a giant bar / stage / nightclub tent. A random stranger bought me a drink, and I stayed there and danced for a while, then wandered slowly back, stopping at any bar I saw that looked interesting, including one where people were dancing with hula hoops on top of giant wooden reels.

I have no idea why anyone bothers taking drugs at Glastonbury. The place is weird enough as it is.

Glastonbury Day 2: I Blame Wayne Rooney

Day 2 dawned bright and sunny.

Too bright and sunny; it was impossible to sleep inside the tents past 8am. I have a high toleration for heat, but even I found it was like trying to sleep in a greenhouse. Ironic, since the night had been freezing cold (well, not literally freezing, but so cold I’d struggled to get to sleep until I put a jumper, trousers and socks on). As the festival wore on, people began to adapt. Around 7-8am, you’d see the sleeping changeover. People in pyjamas would emerge from their tents, dragging their sleeping rolls and sleeping bags with them. Those with tents with awnings would curl up in the shade there, whilst those in smaller tents would kip in the shadow of their tent, or drape a large towel between their tent and a neighbour’s, thus creating a nice large shady spot for an al freso kip.

Nevertheless, we awoke, we stretched, we showered, we ate a cooked breakfast which was not bad except for the peculiar scrambled eggs, and then myself and N dashed off for our briefing in our bar. L, C, and T had not been assigned to a particular bar, so had an afternoon briefing, and a longer day to spend lying around the campsite relaxing.

N and I dashed about looking for our bar, found it behind a hedge near the Pyramid Stage, ducked into the backstage area, and wandered about looking for the briefing, which we knew had already started. I poked my nose into the backstage area of the bar, to be confronted by a tall young woman with long dark hair, a nose ring, a dark blue flowery dress and wellies, dangly earrings made from the loops in the middle of cassette tapes strung together, and the biggest three-cornered pirate’s hat - complete with skull - you’ve ever seen. She was one of the station managers.

We said hello, then N stuck his head in and yelled that he’d found the briefing in the staff rest area of the bar behind the tankers. WBC bars get through so much beer and cider, there are large tankers – the sort you see trundling along the M1 with “Carlsberg” written on the side – parked behind the bar tent. Meaning that a WBC bar is the only place you will hear a bartender using the excuse “Sorry I can’t serve you right now, we’re just changing the tanker”.

The briefing consisted of thirty volunteers of varying ages and genders sitting on the ground in the sunshine drinking water and listening to the bar manager, Paddy, and the assistant bar manager, Mark. Paddy was a huge bearded Irishman with a faintly piratical air, khaki shorts, a green Glastonbury T-shirt, a baseball cap and a cheerful grin. Mark was a smaller Englishman who, in his own words, was nearly thirty but looked about twelve. Paddy was running through the legal requirements of working on the bar, dwelling heavily upon the importance of asking everyone who didn’t actually have grey hair and wrinkles for ID.

As part of this, he explained the concept of the Filter of Shit. The Filter of Shit works as follows: if Paddy received from the police or the festival organisers about selling to underage people / not checking IDs / not selling correct weights and measures, he would then filter it down to Mark and the station managers, who would then filter it down to us. On the other hand, Paddy assured us, this also worked the other way and they were there to support us, so in the event of punters giving us shit about asking them for ID, we were to come and find him. “I LOVE dealing with people like that”, he declared, with the sort of grin I imagine Blackbeard would have worn upon spotting a Spanish galleon on the horizon. We went off to explore the bar area – familiar to me, since most WBC bars are set up the same way.

After that, we escaped into the sunshine and roamed through the festival site. It was all new to N, though not to me, although it was interesting to see the site so early on in the festival. I’d never been there on a Wednesday before, and it was nice to see people creating their own fun. Guitars were brought out and strummed, small stalls were opened, and people wandered freely in the sunshine sucking on large slices of watermelon. It was a truly scorching day, and for the first time ever at the Glastonbury festival I wished I’d brought a bikini.

We headed back to the WBC village to rendezvous with our friends, and found that L and C had gone off to buy chairs whilst we were gone. For a couple of hours we amused ourselves in the sunshine outside our tents, reading the programme, applying suncream, having a drink, customising the chairs with biros and generally hanging out and just chilling. They were a truly great bunch of people and I couldn’t have asked for better companions to spend the festival with.

Eventually, we prised ourselves away from lolling around in the sun, and went off to watch the England match on the big screens near the Pyramid Stage. L, C & T could only stay for half an hour as they had a bar briefing, but myself and N saw the whole match, or at least some of it – our view was obscured by a man with a skull and crossbones flag, who refused to move it despite increasingly strident protests and choruses of “Shit Flag No Fans” from people standing behind him.

N and I would have met up with the others afterwards, but they had been ambushed with an unexpected shift at the bar they’d had their briefing at, so we went for a wander. I found out that one of my favourite bands, Seize the Day, were playing that evening, so N and I made plans to see them, and headed back to the WBC Village for dinner and a drink. We changed into some warmer clothing, and discovered new and interesting patches of sunburn. I had one on my chest which precisely matched where the shawl I’d had round my shoulders whilst watching England had slipped, for which I’m blaming Wayne Rooney.

We marched off to the Mandela bar, only to find it very quiet and with no sign of music. Hmm. This did not bode well. Fortunately, there were some long drop toilets nearby, so I went off to check the band’s stickers with the performance times and locations on (whilst secretly wishing that Seize the Day would advertise somewhere less fragrant).

It turned out they were in the Mandala bar, not the Mandela bar. The Mandala bar was in the Green Fields. I looked at my watch; it was 8pm. We debated whether it was worth going, since we’d arrive in time for the last few songs… N persuaded me it was worth a try. I felt a bit guilty for dragging him all over the site, but we set off with determination, and arrived by 8.30pm. The Mandala bar turned out to be less of a bar than a large café tent with a pedal-powered sound system. As we got there, there was no music drifting out, and we soon learned that technical problems had prevented the band starting on time.

Twenty minutes after we arrived, the band started, and the tent started cheering. It was a mixed crowd of families and passers-by, meaning that it was a polite sort of appreciation, but appreciation it definitely was. Seize the Day played their usual standards – “Designer Kidz”, “With My Hammer” – and gave us some new ones from their new album, with “Globalisation (The Pirate Song)” being especially popular. I trotted over afterwards to buy a CD from them, and we wandered slowly home to meet the others, who were more than slightly disgruntled at having had to work an unexpected shift. C had only had his prescription sunglasses with him (not much use if you need glasses to see and it’s dark in the tent), none of them had had warm clothing for when the temperature dropped in the evening, and L was really suffering with hayfever.

We medicated ourselves with a few drinks in the bar tent, compared our various patches of sunburn – C had the worst – and pottered off to bed. L and C kept us (and some friends we’d made who were camping nearby) awake, and entertained, for a while, with their endless affectionate arguing. I can’t remember all of it, but I do remember the following exchange:

L: “You’re just being really unfair…”
C: “Shut up, you! I should have left you in the car to bark at strangers! AARGH!”
(Pause)
T: “You putting the aftersun on your sunburn, C?”
Bundled in warm clothing against the cold night, we smiled and fell asleep.

Graffiti Philosophy

MotherOfCyclingDiver and I like to take photos of interesting things we see. Here's the results of an interesting exchange of photos of philosophical graffiti.

Spotted on a park bench in my home town:

and near the Cluny in the Ouseburn:

More tales of diving and Glastonbury will come soon, but I'm pushed for time, so it will probably be next week. Off to Bute at the weekend!

Things You Don't Want To Hear Upon Surfacing At The Dive Boat, I

Which would be, as I surfaced from my dive, "The engine's conked out. Steve, get the rod... we're drifting a bit close to those rocks."

Oh, and I realised a vital piece of my equipment might one day kill me.

Winding the tape back. Yesterday I went on a boat dive to the Farne Islands. The Farne Islands are one of the North-East's, and probably the whole of the UK's best dive sites. A set of small rocky islands off the Northumberland coast, they are home to a wide variety of fish, a lot of lobsters and, most importantly, a colony of very friendly and inquisitive grey seals. Videos of divers playing with seals at the Farnes are common on Youtube, and I should add that the seals themselves like to come up and play. They are especially fond of nibbling divers' fins. I know one diver who said that, during one of his dives out there, he seemed to keep kicking his buddy in the face. No matter how hard he tried to move position to avoid it, it kept happening. Finally he turned around, and saw that a grey seal was thoughtfully chewing his fins.

As we arrived at the Farnes aboard our RIB*, the seals popped their heads up to see who was coming to play. I was doing my Deep Diver dives 2 and 3, down to 25 metres. Not my deepest ever dive - that was the 32m dive at Stoney Cove - but the deepest I've been in the sea.

We fell over the side of the boat, demonstrating the "backwards roll entry" which everyone has seen divers do, with varying degrees of proficiently. I kicked over fast to join my colleagues, who of whom suffered from seasickness and had seen his colour dramatically improve since he got off the boat and into the water. He was my buddy, and, accompanied by our instructor, J, we headed off to explore the rocks and grab some depth.

This was one of the best dives I've ever had in the UK. At least 15m vis, bright sunny weather, no serious currents or surge, and lots and lots of fish and lobsters. I tried out my new torch, marvelling at how it really did make it easier to see things even at shallow depths. We finned along, looking at lobsters and occasionally pausing to admire a passing seal, whose turn of speed we could only wish for!

We did our Deep Diver task; a straightforward out-and-back compass navigation swim on the bottom, worked our way up the wall, did a three-minute safety stop hanging onto the kelp, and surfaced, to be met with the words above.

The next hour and a half was spent drifting about as the owner tried to keep us safely anchored whilst trying to obtain a spare anchor from a nearby boat (I really hoped at one point he wasn't going to throw it into our boat) and fix the loose connection in the engine. This did NOTHING for the seasick among us, and all in all we were very relieved to hear the engine start up again!

We motored over to the buoy marking "the boilers", part of a wrecked old ship, and the site of our second dive. And as I descended down the line (wondering why the hell I could see a bathtub down there), I felt the exceptionally unwelcome sensation of my weight belt slipping around my waist. The wretched buckle had slipped along the belt, meaning that the buckle itself was now stuck under my jacket at the side, and my buddy wouldn't be able to find it in case of an emergency. I doubted it would come off, but... should I abort the dive?

I didn't, though I'm still not sure I made the right call there. If I had - no second dive. On the other hand, if my buddy had needed to get it off me, or it had slipped off completely... I did the dive holding the belt with one hand, which wasn't ideal, but did work. It didn't actually come off, but it was a severe nuisance, and I made a mental note that, first thing tomorrow, I was going to Ebay myself a new weight belt. (I did, and have it now.) A weight belt that won't release fast is technically known as a potentially fatal accident waiting to happen.

On the other hand, I still had my weight belt. J was the last one in, and we heard the following conversation:

"Pass us your weight belt, J... pass us your weight belt. Pass us your weight belt... you've dropped it, haven't you?"

He had, so our return home was slightly delayed as we fitted J with spare weights, and he went down there to look for it. (Senior instructors are able to dive alone safely, if they assess that it's safe to do so - the rest of us stick to diving in pairs.) One retrieved weight belt later, and we were hanging onto the boat, and heading for home! All in all, a great day.

*Rigid Inflatable Boat - popular for diving as they are fast, maneouvrable, and extremely hard to capsize.

Stoney Cove, Part the Second

We hung around passing our surface interval* time by discussing the previous dive, sheltering from the rain beneath the car boot lid, and consuming hot chocolate and ham and spready cheese sarnies. After two hours had passed, we strapped ourselves back into our gear, ready to tackle our next dive.

We'd decided to do a shorter dive to take in the Stanegarth, then practise our navigation skills by trying to find the new attraction, the Belinda (another sunken ship). We finned out to the buoy marking the Stanegarth, then descended the line from the buoy to the wreck.

Or, in my case, tried to. I remember thinking "This descent is taking a while", then looked at my computer and realised I was actually shallower than I had been one minute previously. I'd got disorientated as there were no visual references to help me judge whether I was going up or down, just the surrounding green murky water and the white shotline. Fortunately S was in attendance to help guide me down to the wreck, where I would like to say I landed elegantly on the deck, but in fact the phrase "crashed into it and then floundered about inelegantly getting pulled off-balance by the 15L tank I wasn't quite used to yet" would be more accurately. I was really annoyed with myself for buggering up whilst diving with two more experienced divers, but you can't let these things bother you under the water, it spoils your concentration and the dive. It's all a learning experience anyway.

We descended into the interior of the Stanegarth, which, technically, was breaking the rule against not going into overhead environments without equipment and training. On the other hand, the wreck itself is so small you can't get lost, but not so small you are going to get stuck, and has multiple easy exits including a large overhead hatches, so we went in. It was the first time I'd been inside a sunken ship, and it was rather cool, spoiled only by the realisation that my new underwater torch was (hopefully) still sitting on the side of the dock. Bugger! (The photo on the left, which I didn't take, shows the Stanegarth.)

We swam around the Stanegarth, then took a compass reading of 140 degrees and headed off to find the Belinda. After three minutes, a ship loomed up before us, and I remember thinking "Hey, we're getting good at this navigation lark!"

Then I read the name on the front of the ship - Defiant - and thought "Hmm, maybe we're not". On the other hand, we got to see the Defiant, then S made a hand signal I hadn't seen before, of crossing her hands in front of her chest to form a large 'X'. I interpreted it (correctly, as it turned out) as meaning "Time to end this dive".

M sent up a surface marker buoy to give us a line to help with our ascent from 22M - or tried to. I am not an expert on their use, but it was pretty obvious from the fussing of M and S that it was not working the way it was supposed to. Instead, we made a free ascent (an ascent with no visual reference except your computer or depth gauge), finning carefully to maintain our position at 5m deep for a 3 minute safety stop**. We broke the surface and S gave her opinion on the SMB, which I shall reproduce here as "it's not working very well".

We decided to use up our air by finning over to the 7m shelf near the dock, descending to the Nautilus (a model of Captain Nemo's submarine, shown in the photo I didn't take on the left) and feeding the fish with a plastic bag of sweetcorn which M had in her buoyancy jacket for this particular purpose. We descended, looked at the sub, fed the fish, and submerged to find my torch sitting where I'd left it. S advised me to get a clip for it to secure it to my jacket, which I have since done.

We wandered over to the shop, where I realised that I must be a diver. Some women impulse-buy shoes. I impulse-buy big steel bottles full of air. Stoney Cove had some 12L tanks for sale at a very reasonable price, and I decided that hmm, yes, I did want to stop paying £10 to hire a tank every time I want to dive. I purchased the tank, the mesh to protect the paintwork, and the magnetic "compressed air" sign to go on the back of the car. We said our fond farewells, promised to dive together again soon, and I loaded tank, self and dive gear into the car, and headed North and home.

* time on the surface inbetween dives. Necessary to allow your body to "off-gas" i.e. eliminate the nitrogen dissolved in your tissues following the dive. This happens through respiration. The ambient pressure at the surface is lower than when submerged, and whilst you're at the surface, the nitrogen slowly moves out of your tissues, goes into the bloodstream, and is expelled through the lungs. "The bends" happen when you have nitrogen dissolved in your body tissues and move too quickly from being at greater pressure (which keeps it dissolved in your tissues), to being at lower pressure, when it begins to move out of your tissues in bubbles which are too large to safely pass into the bloodstream and do damage to the body on their way out.

Surface intervals allow you to eliminate dissolved nitrogen in between your dives, allowing the second dive to take place safely and giving you more time under the water. If you still have nitrogen dissolved in your tissues from a previous dive, future dives have to be shorter, so that you don't absorb so much nitrogen you can't safely eliminate it without doing decompression stops - which, as a recreational diver, I'm not trained to do (technical divers do decompression diving, recreational divers are not trained for it and don't have the gear to do it safely).

** safety stop. A 3 minute pause at 5 metres deep at the end of a dive to allow dissolved nitrogen to move slowly out of your tissues at a safe rate - the 5m depth maintains sufficient ambient pressure than the nitrogen does not move as quickly out of your tissues as it would at the surface. Differs from a decompression stop because it is not mandatory. Theoretically, you could skip the safety stop and, provided you kept your dive within the no-decompression depth and time limits, you should be safe from the bends. ("Should be" because all divers differ in their physical size, fitness and breathing rates, hence the theoretical models used to calculate no decompression times do not necessarily fit all divers exactly the same.) A decompression stop is required, in the sense of "if you don't do this you'll get the bends".

Deep Dive at Stoney Cove

Last week I fufilled a long-standing ambition to dive with my aunt M, the only diver in the family until I took it up, and her buddy S. S is a technical diver, extremely knowledgeable - the sort of person who services her own regulators*.

We dove at Stoney Cove, one of the two major inland quarry diving sites in the UK (Capernwray is the other one). It was my first freshwater dive, all my dives to date having been in the sea, meaning that on the first day there we did a short "check dive" so I could get my weights right. You are less buoyant in freshwater than in salt water, so you need less weight to offset the exposure suit's buoyancy. I normally dive with 9kg in salt water, and dove with 5kg in fresh, using the same exposure suit but a slightly larger tank: 15L compared to my usual 12L for floating around Beadnell.

Stoney Cove was fun. There were a lot of fish - roach and perch - down there, and quite a few crayfish. I recorded my deepest ever dive, 32 metres. We followed the old quarry road down to the deepest part of the pit. Didn't quite get down to the bottom, as M signalled that she was getting a little cold. I wasn't too bad so long as we kept moving, but it was cold down there; about 7 degrees C. I remember thinking "Hey, look at all those big numbers on my dive computer!" followed shortly by "Hmm, 6 minutes of no-decompression time left... that's not so good, time to turn this around". That was about when M signalled she was cold, so we didn't make it as deep as the Deep Hydrobox, which lies at 36m in the quarry. Next time!

Perhaps I should have been more scared than I was, diving that deep, but I don't remember being scared. Once you get past about 15m, you can't rely on CESA-ing your way out of trouble, and I've dived deeper than that before. At that depth, you rely on your training, your dive plan (and gas planning), and close communication with your buddies. I didn't feel narc'ed, though we didn't do any tests for it - perhaps my slower reaction to seeing the 6 minutes on my computer was a sign? I felt in control, though, so it's difficult to tell.

More tales coming soon.

* The things you breathe through.

A Ride in the Rain

The "Cycling" part of my blogging name is still active, which is just as well, as an ear infection has temporarily stopped me diving (though I expect to be back in the water a week today). I cycle to and from work, and last Tuesday I went for a ride from work in Newcastle out to Derwenthaugh in Gateshead, shown on the left.

Boy, was it a mistake to decide I didn't need my waterproof trousers and overshoes! The top half of me was dry, but the heavens opened both on the way there and back, and my legs were drenched. Not as drenched as our group leader, who is famous for cycling in her ordinary clothes including, on this occasion, white trousers and red high heels. In a funny sort of way, I really respect that, although on this occasion it did mean that we were pedalling like maniacs to keep up with an angry Frenchwoman who wanted to get home to a towel and a shower.

It was actually quite a good ride, in a strange way. There's something in the British psyche that derives a certain pleasure in being out of doors when it's tipping it down. The world was being washed clean, and only those few of us out of doors could truly appreciate it. It wasn't that cold, and as the sun came out, we had some glorious views of the Tyne and its bridges. Even so, it was a very welcome hot chocolate that I consumed when I got in!

CyclingDiver's Rules For Cycling Whilst Wearing A Hat

1. Don't.

2. If you do, tie the hat on firmly first.

3. If you ignore rules 1 & 2, avoid cycling down hills.

4. If you ignore rules 1, 2 & 3, and you go down a hill fast, and the hat starts coming off, ignore it. Under no circumstances give in to either of the contradictory urges to a) grab the hat, b) hit the brakes.

5. Otherwise you will plough the bike and yourself smack into the tarmac, knees first, knock the wind out of yourself, and knock your front wheel out of alignment, such that you have to pay the bike shop a tenner to realign it. And end up with bruises like these:

Yep, that was the famous "Fell off my bike whilst on a cycling holiday incident". That it was my own fault, and that I fell off because I'd gone to view a church, just added insult to injury.

Cakepalooza

Yesterday turned out to be a cakepalooza. A friend at work had a birthday and brought in two giant cakes:

Then the charity cake trolley came round to raise money for a local hospice:

I suppose I should feel guilty about eating that much cake. I just don't. Went to the pub in the evening for a friend's birthday as well, so overall it was a great day. Here's a photo of the sunset from the beer garden:

Sunny, With A Chance of Panic Attacks - Glastonbury Festival Day 1

Warning: This is a long post. You might want to go and get yourself a cup of tea first.

June 23rd

It was 10am as I arrived at Newcastle Central Station on the No. 1 bus on a warm sunny Wednesday morning in Newcastle (itself a rarity). Deep breath. Calm.

In the interests of this blogpost making sense, I should maybe mention at this point that I’m prone to anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, for which I’m on the magic happy pills [Citalopram – an SSRI for those with an interest in such things] that make it largely go away. I’m not particularly embarrassed about this, nor is it – any more – a serious handicap for me, since a combination of pills and therapy mean that these days I can usually leave the house without having to check three times that the oven is turned off. (It usually is.)

Unfortunately for me, anything involved large amounts of organising and going away from home tends to trigger the OCD. This is a perfect description of my role organising volunteers for the bars at the Glastonbury Festival, so it took me a few minutes of sternly talking-to myself before I peeled myself away from checking for the fifth time that the front door was locked (it was), took some deep breaths, and marched off to get the bus. Funnily enough, once I’m actually on the bus / train / plane / whatever, the anxiety goes away, in a sort of “The die is cast” kind of a way, so I was fine once I got the bus. I checked again that I had all the necessities (phonepursekeysdebitcardmoneytrainticketsdetailsofpeopleI’mmeetingupwithatLeedsyesit’sall
there), took a deep breath, admired the lovely sunny day, and applied myself to reading the Metro.

10am, beseated myself beneath the big clock at Central Station, and waited for my fellow volunteer, N, from Newcastle to arrive. I wasn’t too worried. I was calm. He’d be here soon. We were due to get the train at 10.44am.

10.15am. This was the time we’d agreed to meet.

10.20am. He’d be here soon, right?

10.25am: Began minor panic attack in which I began to seriously worry that something had happened to him or I’d given him the wrong date – but we’d exchanged emails for the past week or so in which we’d discussed our arrangements for meeting up and he’d replied to all of them. What could have happened? Started making phone calls to his office / my office to see if there were any messages for me – there weren’t. Called his phone – no reply.

10.30am: Still no news and no reply to my calls. Started having visions of going to the Glastonbury Festival on my own, or at least turning up to meet the volunteers from the union’s Young Members group at Leeds station (whom we’d agreed to meet at Leeds station, since we were all travelling down from the North together) on my own with no explanation for why my fellow volunteer wasn’t with me.

10.35am: To get the train or not to get the train? I decided not to. There was another train after it which still allowed us to get to Leeds in time, and I’d factored this in to us getting the 10.44am train. I texted my contact from the volunteers we were meeting at Leeds to let them know the score.

10.40am: I reflected gloomily on every single thing that had gone wrong in organising volunteers for the Glastonbury Festival this year, such as the form that went missing (meaning that we got two places, not four) to the difficulty I’d had filling the volunteer places with only two people going, and thought that having me alone go to Glastonbury would be the perfect cap on the crappiest year of organising festival volunteers I’d ever had.

10.44am: Train left.

10:46am: Birdsong could not compare to the sweetest sound in the world, nor could choirs of angels; my mobile phone rang with a number I didn’t recognise, but which I knew had to be N’s. It was. (It turned out I had the wrong number for him stored in my phone for some reason.) N had had car trouble on the way here, but was now at Central Station.

I took a deep breath, calmed down, told N that the contingency plan was to get the next train, and we met at the clock. He was fine, albeit flustered. A large cup of tea (for N) and coffee (for me), a phone call to N’s brother to arrange for him to collect and fix the broken-down car, and at 11.10am we were brandishing our open-return tickets at the conductor on the train to Leeds. The journey passed pleasantly, since it turned out we had a similar interest in care for older and vulnerable people (N is a social worker and I do research on this topic). By the time the train arrived at Leeds it was obvious we would get on just fine for the next seven days which we’d be spending in each other’s company.

The next step was to meet the volunteers from the union’s Regional Young Members team, who had caught the 10.44am train from Durham and agreed to meet us in the pub at Leeds station. C, my contact for them, had informed me that they’d be in the White Rose pub at Leeds station, and that he looked like Shrek. I was on the lookout for someone with green skin and funny ears, but N and I decided that it was more probably the young man and woman in the corner who were surrounded by mounds of camping equipment.

They turned out to be C and T from the Young Members group, who were happily ensconced in the corner of the pub eating a burger and sipping a pint whilst they waited for the third member of their team, L, to arrive. L apparently had had difficulty with her manager, despite having booked her leave for the festival, and it had taken until this morning for her to have it confirmed that she was going to be able to go, so she was on the later train. We all agreed this was deeply unfair, and had a drink. N and I ate sandwiches, and we swapped tales of ourselves and our day jobs: Me = researcher, N = social worker, T = works with children in Durham, C = works for Npower, as does L. C warned us: “The thing about L – she’s absolutely lovely – but she can be a bit bonkers. You’ll see when you meet her.”

As it approached 2pm with L not having arrived, I tried to suppress my “Mexican jumping bean” impression which I get when I think I’m going to miss a coach or a train or something. The WBC coach from Leeds to Glastonbury left at 3pm from Leeds Bus Station, and missing it meant missing the festival. Everyone else was more laid back. I went out to research where taxis left from.

At 2.11pm, a young woman with shorts, glasses, a t-shirt, a huge backpack, giant black Goth boots and a large cowboy hat with a cowhide pattern hurried up yelling “Hellllooooo!” This was L, and the gang was complete. We deliberated over whether to walk or get a taxi. I said “Taxi”, and taxi it was. It’s a funny thing about life that often all that matters is whether someone makes the decision, not how it was made nor even whether it was a particularly good decision. We got a taxi, ignored the slightly disgusted look of the taxi driver that we were only going as far as Leeds Bus Station (never mind the fact that we all had huge backpacks) and were sitting in the sunshine on the grass outside Mecca Bingo with our fellow volunteers by half two.

As we awaited the arrival of the coach, the team bonded some more. We learned that L and C were the best of friends, despite the fact that they argue nineteen to the dozen. Also that L was absolutely adorable, had a passion for cows (not like that!), and talked nineteen to the dozen with a huge grin on her face about everything from cows, the Download festival she’d been to recently, the managers who had led to her having to get the late train and nearly missing the festival, and her new boyfriend, who she was clearly head-over-heels for.

At 2.40pm, the coach rolled up. Unlike last year, there actually was a member of the WBC management staff with a register of people who were meant to be on the coach. We got ourselves ticked off, got our gear loaded up, got on the coach and basked in the air-conditioning. I reflected on the fact that this might be the first Glastonbury festival I’d been to where I actually didn’t need wellies. The coach rolled forward at 3.05pm. and we were off! Finally, we were on our way, and I could relax. From here, we were definitely going to the festival and whilst I wasn’t officially responsible for the Young Members team, I was the only one of the five of us who’d ever been to Glastonbury before, let alone worked behind a bar there. I allowed a grin to spread over my face. Despite everything, we were on our way to Glastonbury, and it looked like the five of us would get on like a house on fire, which was great. You really need a group of at least four of you to go to Glastonbury, it’s more fun that way, and it looked like this was gonna be a good ‘un.

As coach journeys go, it was an interesting one. Mainly because the WBC guy who’d had the register sat at the front and talked non-stop at a loud volume about everything from motorbikes at the Redbeck Motel - interesting to me, since it’s near my home town and I’ve eaten there a few times - to chicken husbandry, which he clearly had a deep interest in. He also swore so much whilst doing so that C commented to me as we munched on burgers at the service station “You know, I swear a fair bit myself, but that guy…” The stop at the service station was also enlivened by a suicidal caravan-owner who pulled out right in front of our coach, despite the GIVE WAY markings in front of him. Catastrophe, and having to pick bits of caravan out of the front of the coach, was only just averted.

The coach set off again, with me mentally crossing my fingers that this was not going to be a repeat of the god-awful journey we’d had last time, when the coach sat in traffic for six hours waiting to get in the Festival and we arrived there at half two in the morning to be told that the WBC canteen had just closed, and no, we couldn’t get our passes until the morning, so going out into the festival site to buy food wasn’t going to happen either. About the only good thing about that year’s journey had been the hero coach driver, who kept up a cheerful and encouraging commentary, despite the fact he must have been knackered, and brought along his entire Coen brothers DVD collection to play on the coach. We all tipped him at least £3 each – he’d earned it.

Happily, this year was infinitely better. The coach pulled up in the festival car park at 8.30pm, as the sun was dropping low on the horizon. As we stood around looking at our luggage and waiting for someone to tell us where to go next, I took the chance to try explain the concept of “festival time” to everyone.

“Festival time” essentially means “Stuff will happen when it is ready to happen”, or manana. At the festival, there is no point rushing about or getting impatient because things aren’t happening right now, or on schedule. Stuff will happen when it is ready to happen. Sit down in the shade. Stand in the queue. Chill out, have a drink and a chat.

It also means that the normal rules of life and time don’t apply. Why work to a 9-5 timetable when there is no 9-5? If you don’t have to get enough sleep and be up to work at 9am, it’s perfectly sensible to stay up until four in the morning, then kip until 8am - kipping in the tents for later than this was well-nigh impossible, for reasons that will shortly be described - stagger up, shower, dress, eat, then find a convenient shady spot and kip in it for a few hours, or go watch a band, have an afternoon nap under a tree, then stay up all night. Medieval peasants used to do this sort of thing, and I’m told it’s found elsewhere in the world; instead of one long period of sleep, two short ones over 24 hours.

This all, alas, had one very important exception for us: WBC volunteers do not get the luxury of applying this philosophy to our shifts, for which we must always be ten minutes early else risk getting our organisations in trouble (i.e. fewer or no places for the following year).

At that particular moment, however, everyone was really more interested in getting onsite and getting their tents up before the sunset. This wasn’t going to happen too fast, since the coach had dropped us in the wrong place. It was supposed to take us inside the festival site and drop us off outside our campsite. Instead, either the stewards had misunderstood or the driver had misunderstood the stewards (or he hadn’t been provided with the correct pass to enter the site, which would cause us some major problems in five days’ time), and dropped us at the coach park, outside the fence. If you’ve ever been to Glastonbury, you’ll know that getting inside the security fence is no easy matter, so we were somewhat stuck.

We hung about on the grass outside the fence waiting for a steward to show up and let us in, and had a natter. I took some photos of the sunset. Finally, the stewards arrived with our wristbands, we were let in, and we walked, or in some cases staggered, down to the WBC village, our home for the next five days. The sun was setting, but we had enough light to pick a nice camping spot, near but not too near to the toilets and marquee. I had my trusty £15 tent from the Famous Army Stores, first bought for a People and Planet festival I attended as a student way back in 2003. It and I have survived the 2005 and 2007 Glastonbury festivals. It may not be the fanciest tent in the world, but by golly it’s good for festivals.

Tents were pitched, airbeds were blown up, L’s giant Goth boots were pressed into service as an improvised tent peg mallet, and we descended upon the bar in the marquee. After a long day, no-one really wanted to stay up too late, and we had a briefing at an unfeasibly early hour the following morning. We drank, we chilled, we crawled into our tents, did a round of “Night Johnboy”s, and kipped. I fell asleep with a smile on my face. The omens were good.