Glastonbury 2005
So we were camped on Pennard’s Hill in 2005, front seats for the floods and a personal invite to permenent mental health issues.
The weather was crazy from the start. Firstly, glorious sunshine that’s not so glorious if you’re ginger and sunburned and it’s 7AM and you’ve been up until 6 getting thoroughly dehydrated. Then came the freak gusts of winds, mini-twisters flowing up the hill to a Mexian wave of screams and cheers, as tents rose into the air then came crashing down. In one act of foreshadowing, a gazeebo from a nearby group took flight and landed upside down on one of our camp’s tents, snapping a pole. In another, a flash of hailstones - mid-June and mid-heatwave - had everyone laughing in bemusement, oblivious or in denial of the warning it served.
Then the rain arrived. Thursday night became Friday morning and we awoke to the rumble of thunder. “Get up, check your tents!” - colleague-turned-friend Ged. (I never saw him again afterwards, I heard a rumour he joined a commune but all we really know is he turned his phone off and never made it back to work.) Anyway, make a joint, bimble off to get coffees, and when we got back the main event had started without us:
The worst of the storm damage came when a river running through the site burst its banks and sent a torrent of water through a field of tents.
The slowly rising water table had revealed itself to be flowing, which is fucking obvious in hindsight when you consider we were on a hill, but it was hard to see the camp for the tents. Ged, who had assured us during the wind incidents that he hadn’t brought anything he wasn’t willing to lose, saw his tent buckle under the weight of the water and as it was squashed flat. Mine, a slug-shaped one man sleeping-bag-on-the-ground kind of deal was flooded, I managed to drag it out of the carnage and set it aside. Thankfully most of my clothes were in bin bags so were mostly dry, most of the XTC pills had turned into a cake in the bag, and my weed was drenched too. Becky, a girl from the Isle of Man who we’d met on the train, her tent was crushed and its contents including clothes, phone, purse, keys and train tickets sailed down the hill into a lake of mud and upturned toilets, never to be seen again.
The festival spirit didn’t leave us though. Joking about it, buzzing from the excitement and tales of the Pyramid Stage being struck by lightning, offers of help and the sunshine threatening to return and dry everything out. People sailed through the camp down to the bogwash, it’d all be okay. Get back to the business of getting wasted and winging it, sorting things out as they showed up.
That’s our gazeebo right there.
Then the sun started to set. Cold, tired, damp and missed all the act on Friday, the mood had changed - but I woudln’t say “sobering”; true to form, I’d stuck to the original plan and carried on drinking and dropping X all day. And through the night too. And the next day. And the one after. My brother, who’d lost his tent shared my floor slug. He and Danny split the pill cake in half and necked about ten conjoined tabs each, I guess because fuck it, what’s the worst that could happen?
I didn’t see Danny for 10 years after that, for a while I thought he was dead and nobody would tell me. That’s what the voices would tell me all the time. Turns out he’d messed his brain up in a similar way to me, depressed and somewhat recluse, but without a family history of schizophrenia.
So, as the weekend went on I endured a descent into madness, I paced round in constant panic thinking I was being followed, and if I went to sleep I’d get stabbed. Food was off the menu as poisoned, everyone hated me for being so jolly at a time of such misery. They didn’t, and for the next 6 months street signs and car registration plates weren’t taunting me with unknown, ominous warnings. I had to stop smoking weed as was now an amplifier of an almost permenent psychosis, as is the insomnia that made me good at computers.
I never really recovered from that year. The brain, it seems, is far more delicate than you’d think.