Lucy goes to Glastonbury tomorrow.
She is going to be away for a week.
She is going on a coach with all of the other hired thugs. They will arrive at Glastonbury tomorrow night, and start work at eight on Wednesday morning, which is when other people are allowed on to the site.
I have been looking at the Glastonbury Festival website, which includes a little video from the Met Office remarking that it is likely to be the hottest festival on record.
Lucy has got to wear a uniform and boots. I hope she is all right.
We have spent today packing.
I have been to Glastonbury Festival myself, obviously, because it is something no self-respecting disreputable person should have to leave out of their CV. It was when Numbers One and Two Daughters were small, and it was an enormous adventure, especially the toilets.
I have tried to explain the awfulness of the toilets to Lucy, who has never encountered a long-drop outdoor toilet in the rain, especially one that has already been used by sixty thousand other drunk people.
I am not sure that she believes me. I don’t think it is possible to adequately explain this sort of experience anyway, some things you are best left to find out for yourself. I am very glad I am old. I do not think it is an experience I would care to repeat these days.
Lucy has listened to my stories of my hippie festival days with astonishment, mostly at my advanced old age. Obviously it was long before mobile phones or credit card payments or computers or cash machines made an appearance on site, and my chief memory was of arriving on the field to see it powered by a massive windmill. I had never seen a windmill, apart from the sort that narrowly missed Windy Miller at Camberwick Green every week, and thought that it was wonderful, the shape of a new, greener future.
I was young and idealistic in those days.
Also I purchased tie-dyed items of clothing during the weekend, mostly knitted smocks.
Lucy was horrified by all of these reminiscences, and hoped fervently that things had improved.
I suppose it will be very different. In my day we were all in Greenpeace and wanted to save the whales from the Japanese. We just thought that hot weather was a welcome change, not a sign of approaching doom.
Of course Lucy is accustomed to packing things up, and we have adapted her school trunk for the purpose. I asked Mark if he would seal the corners to make sure that it didn’t leak, and he said that he would, but when he came to do it this morning it turned out that he had already done it, probably before she first went off to school.
Lucy’s trunk is actually a large tin box purchased by us when we were in India, for the purpose of lugging junk about. When she started at boarding school Mark sprayed it blue, and I painted pictures on the lid, so that nobody would notice that it was not a proper middle class trunk belonging to the sort of pupil who might have affluent parents and be called Francesca.
This activity made absolutely certain that it would never, ever blend into the background of any luggage storage facility, anywhere, ever.
It has been well-used in the years that followed, and bashed and sat on and chucked about, but it is still going strong.
Today we filled it with camping gear, and insect repellent, and pot noodles for catering emergencies, and I chucked in a bottle of hand sanitiser, because of the toilets. That had not been invented in my day either.
We remembered loo roll and a sun hat at the last minute, and Lucy added some books in case she didn’t like anybody. I gave her some parental advice about experimenting with drugs, mostly that cannabis stays in your bloodstream for a month so perhaps it is a good job that she doesn’t join the police until September.
She will be offered drugs. It is Glastonbury Festival. She listened carefully and said that she would bear it all in mind and did I know anything about contraceptives?
I shall find something else to think about for the next week.
She will be working twelve hour shifts anyway. She will not have time to get into trouble, and if the thirty degree heatwave does turn up, it will be far too hot to share a sleeping bag.
We are taking her to Lancaster tomorrow morning for the coach.
It is going to be an awf’lly big adventure.
