Florian and Christie try to convince me to share a taxi home but I decide to catch the tube, as I want some time to read my new book. There's a funky jazz quartet busking outside the Embankment station but I stick my plugs in my ears and listen to Bjork. Walking through the tunnels I pass someone playing the bagpipes, and I want to give him money - it must take skill to make such precise screeching sounds.

Waiting for the train - 15 minutes is an extraordinary long delay - I read my new book. The underground is always draped in a thin black mist, I think its brake pads or something. Nobody here seems to talk.

On the train the two tuxedoed guys opposite me have come from a wedding or ball - one clutches a cheap bottle of Italian red and the other already has pink vomit stains on his collars and cuffs. He's sleeping. After about 5 minutes he begins making drawn out retching noises, his mate tries to calm him down. I watch him vomit a bit of pink - nobody else in the carriage train takes any notice. When the train stops at Kennington the guy clutching the bottle cajoles the catatonic one out the door.

I enjoy the walk home - London is a good place to walk at night. The buildings I pass by are solid uninterrupted blocks of accommodation; series of identical flats, each ridiculously narrow and two storeys high. The more expensive flats have an extended floor going downwards. Everything is bathed in a uniform orange from the street lights. My flat - a small three bedroom affair with no water pressure in the shower, electric stove and small combined kitchen/laundry costs about 2.5K AUD per calendar month. But it's central - only a few other people I know can reasonably walk to work each day.

I get home and Albane is still awake. In the morning she drinks coffee out of a bowl (apparently this is how its done in France). Now she's drinking gin while taking a few slices off a loaf of sourdough. I'm not ready to go to bed so I grab an opened bottle of white out of the fridge and sit down to listen to the financial hardships of coming to London from the Continent.

Albane gets a call, and soon after gets up and heads out to Camden Town. I decide to turn in for the night and head up to my room, where Bob is already settled into his mattress.

Although there is no excuse for being bored in London, you do have to actively look out for things you'd be interested in, because nothing here is so unusual that you could expect to be notified of it. I'm starting to feel as though I'm waiting for something else, though.

- some time ago my account got disabled. I asked 'them' why and apparently some spammer had set up some crap on my server that was spamming people.
- I got too carefree when deleting stuff that looked dodgy and accidentally deleted the files that let me write blog entries
- I only just got around to fixing it.

In other news: Sicily last weekend was awesome. Barcelona the weekend after this, then Japan for three weeks!

Things I haven't written about that I really wanted to (not in chronological order):
- Japan '06
- Prague with the Cechner family and Matty
- Germany/Oktoberfest with Shauny and Zoe
- Barcelona
- A Venice/Rome/Florence trip with Aki
- Scotland with Aki
- Dublin with Karim
- Wales with Mos/Melle/Matty
- Amsterdam with Mos/Melle/Matty
- Sicily
- Paris with Aki/Mos/Melle

Crazy times I tell you. Crazy times.

--
Paul

02-July: Added some YouTube video links (see the Björk section especially) and a 'night life' section that came to me in a distorted flashback.

26-June: I'll put some photos up some time hopefully. Until I do though, check these out:
Steve's photos
BBC 'Watch and Listen' - video performances of Glastonbury (UPDATE: not working! Instead I went through this article and added a bunch of youtube Glastonbury video links I found, especially the Björk section at the end)

Your first view of the festival as your coach peaks the final hill reveals a river of tents like confetti through the whole valley. Astute watchers would notice the bulging gray masses that are the stages poking evenly among the milieu.

What you wouldn't notice at that distance is the devolved state of humanity down in that bowl. Bleary eyed revelers struggle through almost primordeal ooze, fiercely determined to wring unforgettable experience from the very music, mud and humanity surrounding them. For four days decency, planning and consequence are relegated to memories of the trappings of the outside world.

The Venue
Flags are a Glastonbury tradition, but essential if you want anyone to find you. The taller and the funnier the better.

Mud mud mud. MUD.

Toilets. Its best if I don't spend too long talking about this, because the memory of them makes me want to retch.
We are all just sentient poop sacks. Much of the time is spent learning to deal with 175,000 poop sacks all living together. Every time I saw someone eating a curry I wanted to shout at them for being a selfish prick and making my life harder. You know the old Long Drop? Well imagine a few dozen of these jammed close together with very well lit drops. Basically a platform 5 and a half feet above a bare piece of well-lit ground. After the first day I resolved that I would never use one again. Thank fuck for mens urinals and Steve's bowel-restrictive drugs.

Its hard to describe the scope of the festival. If one in every 120 people living in Australia all gathered together in one farm, camped together and jumped up and down to the same music, you'd have the right type and sized crowd. If one could take from each of those people a list of bands that would play at their dream festival, and then average them out, you'd have the Glastonbury lineup.

The town of Glastonbury now revolves around the festival, apparently having no other real industry not derived from it.

Many stalls, enough so there are usually tolerable queues.

The Music
The following is an inventory of the bands that I remember seeing...

Day 1
Modest Mouse, Bright Eyes, Automatic, Arcade Fire
Björk (over Arctic Monkeys, Damien Marley, Damien Rice and Fat Boy Slim)

Every one of these bands was fucking awesome. Björk was the hilight of the entire festival as far as I was concerned, much to my great surprise.

Day 2
Soil and the Pimp Sessions
The Bees, Dirty Pretty Things, Lilly allen, Get Cape Wear Cape Fly

John Fogerty,
Iggy and the Stooges (over The Killers)

A day of discovery, I guess. Never heard of Soil, The Bees or Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly but they were all very entertaining. Soil and the Pimp Sessions at the Jazz tent especially had an incredible aura of energy about them, so I bought a CD and got em to sign it.

I didn't even know John Fogerty was going to be there till I got there. He played an entirely Creedence set, and I realised that even though this guy up on stage with the terrible terrible hairpiece is possibly just an old guy trying to cash in on his past success, his music is still awesome. I woke my dad twice with phone calls (at 5am West Australia time).

Iggy was an entertaining old man. His wiry body is now covered in a thin layer of loose skin, but he still runs around the stage waving his thin flowing locks with great gusto. At one stage he encouraged the entire audience to rush past security and join him on stage. He spent a subsequent 20 minutes asking the audience to leave him a little room on stage (he had fallen off) so he could continue. His audience interactions, rambling soliliquies and whimsical Sinatra renditions as security evacuated everyone from the stage were hilarious.

Day 3
Marley Brothers Exodus 30th Anniversary,
Dame Shirley Bassey, Manic Street Preachers, Kaiser Chiefs,

The Who (over Chemical Brothers and Pendulum)

Shirley Bassey was a saucy minx. An old saucy minx, but saucy nevertheless. She played Hey Big Spender twice in a row [video], even though she barely had the stamina for it, with humerous consequences. The only performer at the festival with a full orchestra behind her, and possibly the only performer there with the ability to drown out an entire orchestra with her huge lungs.

All I'll say about The Who is that Simon Townsend still windmills like a champ. He never really let up with the windmills actually. I just wish it wasn't raining the entire time, or that I'd bought a jacket with me, or that it wasn't midnight and fucking freezing.

There's a constant compromise in determining which headliners to see, because three usually play at the same time. I soon realised that this was necessary, and that I was even glad for the fact... When 175,000 people gather at a particular place, the last thing you want is to encourage them all to stand closely together at the same stage.

Made all the good choices, very pleased, but on the last day it didn't matter. It doesn't matter what you do, as long as you are wandering around listening to music. If you don't like something, move on and there will be awesome somewhere else. For example, a person could be guided by the crazy band names. Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly and Soil and the Pimp Sessions were both awesome bands that we visited only because we liked the sound of their names, but thoroughly enjoyed.

Night time
Wandering around after midnight is like wandering into another world altogether. My first such excursion was met with a psychadelic gameshow hosted by Rocky Horror Addams Family-alikes, shiny teeth and slicked greasy hair with pencil moustache, and the women hunched maids with bloodied mouths. They pulled audience members up and presented them with tragic disturbing doomsday scenarios and provoked a response.

One man, after being told he was a defective android and trying to navigate through his own deactivation/suicide service call dropped the microphone and ran off the stage with his head in his hands.

One woman was passed a swaddled baby and told she was a mother in a luddite paradise, no technology ruling her, but her baby was dying of whooping cough (with echoing sound effects surrounding us). She was told that her baby would die, and that she had no choice, then her baby died and they gave her a free beer.

Purdey volunteered, and was put in a thick black burka (Islamic head-to-toe robe.) The host asked her if shed ever had pre-marital sex, then they began throwing rocks at her. I don't think I'll quickly forget seeing Purdey dressed as a black ghost, being stoned by an angry mob, waving and giggling drunkenly.

The Holiday
Inertia guides you. Should you get something to eat between acts? No, because it would take more than an hour to slog to the food tents through the ridiculously thick mud. The hunger is also finely balanced with wanting to minimise your toilet trips.

My understanding of comfort levels were dramatically altered after only the first two days of washing with wet wipes, dreading toilets, and wresting my body through 5 inches of mud for a good 6 hours of each day. I shudder to think what it must have been like for the poor drunken souls who ended up covered head to toe in mud, for whatever reason.

Glastonbury guidelines
First, most important: take gumboots.
Gumboot cleaning kit: probably just a brush would do.
Possibly some drug that restricts bowel movement.
Put your tent far away from the main crowd, as night time mud wanderers don't stumble through tent guy ropes with the acuity the nomadic residents there might hope for.
There's plenty of food at the festival, and it's relatively tasty and affordable (for an English festival.)

Björk
This deserves its own section because I want to hilight how fucking awesome she was. It was worth the 150 pounds I paid for the ticket just to go see her. Her performance is like a story that unfolds, or probably more a weird dream that you can barely recall on waking, let alone explain to anyone.

Check out this video the entire way through to see how her Hyperballad turned into some kind of techno industrial dreamscape halfway through. Also notice the unbelievably cool touchscreen instrument thing the dude plays near the end.

Then watch the last half of this video for an idea of the frenzy she worked the crowd into by her penultimate performance.

Also Army Of Me got stuck in my head all weekend.

Now compare this to the Björk at Glastonbury 12 years ago... her image has certainly matured.

Three days of sleeping in a tent, sharing public toilets (god I hope there's toilets) with over 130,000 people, Bjork, Arcade Fire, Killers, Iggy Pop, The Who, Kaiser Chiefs, Manic Street Preachers, The Chemical Brothers, Bill Bragg, Pendulum Live Set, Krafty Kuts.

It was a close thing, as I had double-booked that weekend with Karim coming from Australia. But now everythings coming up Cechner.

Consider this my punishment for not putting anything up for ages at a time.

I never thought it necessary to mention this fact while I was living with him - perhaps it's a cheap shot, or perhaps I already felt bad enough for him being vegetarian or something. But he snores... pretty loudly.

I only feel that I should mention it now because he's keeping me awake. And it feels appropriate that I spend my idle waking moments making sure he pays in some way.

I put some music on and chatted with Shauny online for a while. Now I'm gonna try sleeping lying with my deaf ear exposed. I guess now all I can do then is pray for a quick death.

Tonight sees another young sibling off of my corner of the world for god knows how long. Matthew's stay here has been sweet - it must have cost me at least my entire body's worth of organs on the black market trying to scrounge out eateries, events and travels. This mode of operation is starting to take a toll however, the beers and food at constant war with my curvy waistline and London luncheoning making a mockery of my newly elevated income (yesterdays Thai restaurant punched in at over $130 AUD).

Then, of course, there was the Shopping Spree. Matty decided to encourage me to buy a top-of-the-range stereo system, Apple wireless keyboard and mouse, 500Gig external hard drive, bluetooth wireless headset and mic and various other miscellany all in the same 24 hour time period. As the once brand-cynical personification of sparse day-to-day existence I find my newly kitted out technology pod bedroom a constant source of wonder.

Yet my only worry is that we did not get involved enough. Though Christmas in Wales was certainly a hilight of my time in England so far, New Years was a disappointing nightclub dancing to, I swear without a word of a lie, S-Club 7 (a more sold-out version of the Wiggles.) At least for a couple of songs. And looking around the club I was aghast to realise that most people seemed to know the words to the songs!

Anyway, Lucien will be here for part of this weekend, then I'll hopefully meet Matty in Prague the weekend after, then a weekend off before heading to Amsterdam with Mos and Melle to meet up with Matty one last time.

No rest for the wicked - somethings after you!