Chapter One

It was all pretty spur of the moment,
A phone call,
An offer,
An opportunity seized,
5 days away,
Another festival,
That’ll bring this year's total to 9,

Earning me the self appointed title,
“The official King of the UK summertime.”
I mean being a poet has to have its occasional advantages.

Although I don’t really know the people who I’m staying with,
I wonder if they’re my kind of people?

See I’m a bit marmite me,
And it’s going to be a long weekend if I’m on my own,

Fortunately I’d procured a large bag of weed from a friend of mind in Nottingham,
When he’d sold it to me he’d told me that it’s not even skunk,
This shit, is the fucking reaper.

Trust me no explanation of how good this weed is will even come close to explaining how good this weed is. That’s how good this weed is.

The reaper will change how you smoke cannabis. Add to that the cheeky bit of beaky he’d thrown into the deal and I had all the ingredients I needed to start making some friends,



Festival scenario…

Only 10,000 people including all crew;
Like someone had had the bright idea of pouring all the other festivals through a Britter water filter and then getting all the craziest shit that gathers in the top.



You know all the crusties, hippies and crazies the fairies and fancy dress, all the human animals and still walkers, all the circus performers and an enormous amount of drug users and party pirates that were more than ready to embrace the shit out of the sunniest weekend in the history of this summer, right, then smack all of them in a specially sculpted fantasy landscape located in a place that you can only find if you know where it is. Like an army of neon zombies spitting glitter through Peter Pan’s musical sex-dreams.
My role in this madness was to stand on a stage in a chai tea tent and speak for 10-15 minutes on between 2 and 4 occasions across the 4 days.
1st one was Thursday night; I did just under 4 minutes. Then bid the audience farewell and left via the front of the stage so as to not be caught by the administration.

The reason I left after only 4 minutes isn’t just because I’m incredibly workshy. But also because I’d just found some friends.

Kieran and Ed, Suffolk boys. These 2 live in converted horseboxes and build fences, put up flags etc to get free entry into various festivals across the summer. They do it every year.

I met Kieran at the beginning of the summer. In what seems like the olden days. Glastonbury. We’d reaffirmed our relationship in the woods of Latitude over laughing gas balloons to the sounds of Queen, “Don’t stop me now, I’m having such a good time…” That’s our song. It makes me shed an uncomfortable shudder whenever it comes on the radio now.

Ed I’d not met before but within a few moments of becoming acquainted we’d pushed a couple of badly sketched lines into the fronts of our faces and co-chatted a similarly enough brand of random bullshit to persuade each other that we were on the same level, My kind of people.
By Friday afternoon I had talked on stage another 2 times and Ed, Kieran and I had become firm friends; in fact more than that, we were festival brethren.
Anyone of us would have shared his wealth with or risked his life for the others.
As the sun sank out of sight in the early part of Friday night we made a pact, no sleep till Sunday.

Sleep is for the weak; all we need is drugs.
At that point our poison was all bison-grass vodka, UHT white Russians, reaper weed and cheeky lines of cocaine from inside the horse trailer, but we had dyslexic daydreams of MDMA, Es, K, LSD and nO2 to come later all we needed to do was find it. And as Kieran rightly pointed out as we were sat in the van, it had to be in there somewhere.
Three sniffs later we were in the open air of our camp banging together the foundations of a plan for the evening,
Get in the middle find MDMA, but make a spliff first and smoke it before we leave,

And that’s when we first saw her.
She started as a half lit silhouette in the ambient distance, a distinctly feminine form framed by a fragile corner of light emulating from the interior bulb of a customised volks-wagon van,
we were all instantly aware of her and although our vision was limited by the descent of darkness we all saw that she was beautiful,

Festival Venus,
She’d seen us too, and again though the mask of night hid the details of our appearance she’d seen we were here to have fun, and so she approached, her calculated steps algorithmically increasing our collective heartbeat, we watched her as one, our ascending pulse rate framing the moments prior to our inevitable introduction in what seemed like slow motion.

Her stride never strayed from the straightest of lines and we swayed in time to the pendulous motion of her hips, each step was a sigh and as she walked into our lives our eyes reflected and amplified the smile on her lips,

Aphrodite in stripy Lycra, wearing her knickers on the outside of her tights,
She was the kind of girl, who makes you glad to be alive, the kind of girl whose beauty exposed the mundanity of a lifetime’s worth of sunsets and sunrises,
The kind of girl who makes you want to kill all your friends and just start wanking,

She was hot shit, and inside we were all thanking a god that not one of us believed in, for the angel he’d sent us on this hot summers night,
I mean she was absa-fucking-lutely amazing, she introduced her self and sat down in the same action, our plans of going back in were simultaneously abandoned; we all knew that now she’d arrived we weren’t ready to leave.
Now I’m a strong believer in not judging books by their covers, but I have bought vinyl on the strength of the artwork on the sleeve, and believe me her music didn’t disappoint us,
We danced to her conversation like it was our theme-tune, she breathed us in and exhaled laughter, after 20 minutes she was our forth quarter, and all of us, all of us loved her,

Apparently her and her friend also got in for free because they dressed up like sexy animals and ran around the festival for an hour or so, she asked if they could party with us tonight.

Her casual question provoked feelings that could only be expressed by us looking at each other, taking a deep breath, nodding through a smile and then looking back at her.

It was agreed with out the need for conventional language, just involuntary gesture and a smile three men wide,
“Oh look,” she said “Here’s my friend now,”
"Guys meet Dog-Man."

Chapter Two

Dog-Man was exactly what his name suggests,
A thirty something, 14 stone man, who was born to be in this festival,

Dressed in a customised bowler hat complete with floppy dog-ears and what can only be described as a one-piece-backless-dog-skin-wrestling-suit.



Backless to the point that it was more than apparent that Dog-Man was not the kind of man to be constrained by traditional under-ware. He travelled via rhythmic, sequential jumps between wild on the spot full body boogieing, underpinned by his own spontaneous words of encouragement, “oohhh yeeaahh!!!”
he had large plastic eyebrows attached to the front of his hat, hovering like an umlaut, accenting his stupid cartoon dog of a face.

Seriously his actual human face looked like the comical visage of a cartoon dog.

Dog-Man danced his way through our looks of disappointment and settled in a seat at the head of our circle, we greeted him with Vodka and contempt and he knocked it back and shrugged it off like it was something he was more than used to.

The three of us ran relay through the trailer passing our coiled £20 baton like Olympians, I was anchor-man racing down the home straight to the glory of securely unrolling the bank note as I shoved it back into my pocket.
As I emerged from the van conversation had moved to poetry and I was being goaded for an ad hoc performance, naturally I was happy to oblige but the cocaine made me revel in their asking to the point where they almost lost interest.
Still, eventually I did a poem.
Of course I was mainly performing for her, hoping she might see a piece of my soul and warm to my apparent sensitivity, but I was also performing for him. Dog-Man, his bewildered smile hanging on my words, his eyes alight as he imagined my interpretation of reality, sharing my world.

As the poem reached it’s conclusion we collectively applauded our moment and I collapsed back into my chair, through the subsequent tangle of conversation she leant in and explained that she too had a poem, and she’d tell it me later.
I sat saturated in the thought of linguistic possibility passing a lazy eye through middle distance when I caught Dog-Mans gaze, he smiled and nodded with what seemed like approval and I felt validated and in the company of friends.
Before I knew it we were moving again, back inside to find hard drugs and soft feelings, the three of us momentarily separating from the two of them forming a walking huddle where we discussed 3 simple truths.
1. She is by far the most perfect girl anyone of us has ever met or will ever meet.
2. Whatever we do we have to keep her with us.
3. Dog-Man is clearly her boyfriend.
This third truth hurt us all but we chose to ignore its pain,
Within moments of being inside we were washing down the bitter taste of MDMA with Aspall’s cider and Dog-Man had become The Party Dog.

Party Dog led us to a busy tent filled with electric music and spasmodic dance moves and there in the drugs started to take hold.
It started with a warm feeling at the back of the neck and spread like an Indian head massage of lackadaisical confusion, all shape and colour. It hit like a wave and though I felt as if I was lying on my back, but when the spray cleared I realised I was dancing.

Not only dancing but dancing with her. Her ass was a hypnotist’s pocket watch and I fell under its spell willingly. Synchronising my movement to its tick-tock invitation.
A few well placed steps later and we were grinding, moving as one, the tight toned muscles of her buttocks tensing and relaxing against my crotch, the soft sloping nape of her neck glimmering as the light reflected off the sweat on her shoulder.
With her body pressed against mine she hung her head back and shot me a smile over her side her eyes all promises and secrets, this was definitely a lot more than just sexual, but it was also definitely giving me a hard-on.
Then it was Kieran’s turn and as she peeled herself off me the cold hit my newly exposed front and I was left looking into the eyes of the Party-Dog, he nodded his familiar smile of approval and I felt the sting of guilt in the small of my back.
Once she had had her fill of electric zombie frottage we moved on, her appetite for dance replaced by a craving for laughing gas.
NO2 or laughing gas as it’s more commonly know is actually what the dentist uses to render you unconscious before any particularly painful work can be done. In smaller quantities (usually a balloons worth), it creates feelings of euphoria, giddiness and drastically altered perceptions. These feelings don’t last long and generally once you’ve done one you want another. That’s why they call it Hippy-Crack.
Good thing it’s only £2 per balloon.
As we searched the surrounding fields for the indicative “spussssssssshhhhh” sound of the dispenser I realised our group had grown in size.
“Over here” spussssssssshhhhh, Kieran’s voice,
Minutes later we were scattered across a hey bail frantically inhaling and exhaling into multi-coloured balloons,
The first one didn’t go so well; one of the new people was a girl in the last year of her teen’s who later admitted to “not being much of a drinker.”

For her the laughing-crack was perhaps too much too soon and I have hazy recollections of panic and mass concern, inevitably she awoke giggling in the recovery position, we collectively sighed relief and Party-Dog got the next round of balloons in.




New Balloon new location, and we found ourselves atop a pyramid of Hey bails. It must have been at least 4-5 meters from ground level and as Ed, Kieran and I stood at it’s edge we all agreed,
“This is fucking well dangerous”

Spussssssssshhhhh,

Back to the circle. Kieran and Ed at my flanks, her opposite and Dog-Man hovering over us all, still dancing to his own reassurance, “Ooohhh yeaahhh”


All together,
Inhale,
Exhale,
In, Out, in, Out, In, Out,
In……. and there in that moment that felt like time shivered, when it felt like somebody threw a pebble in to the still water that was my existence, reducing me to ripples, in that moment it all became clear.

She reached out and took my hand, then took Kieran's hand and counter-levered herself to her feet just long enough to smile before collapsing across all three of our laps.
And there in she squirmed,
riving in the physicality of our connection,
her perfectly sculpted angles nestling and tessellating into our comfortable flesh,
and as she lay across us I looked at Kieran, Kieran looked at Ed, Ed looked at me and then we all looked at Dog-Man.

Dog-Man raised one approving eyebrow, nodded slowly and mouthed the words,
“OOOOOOOOHHHHHHH YYYYEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHH.”

That’s when the forth truth hit me, like your mum walking in on you mid-wank, awkward and dirty,
I turned to the others to voice my concerns.
“Shit, I think Dog-Man wants to watch us while we all bang his Misses.”


Chapter Three

it’s later and we had switched our hey bail for a tree-house full of wet cushions and broken piano music, and were playing “Guess Who?” through a megaphone using questions based on assumed personality traits,

“Does your person have unresolved anger issues?”
She sat at the centre of several concentric circles of new friends, a carnival conga that had been steadily growing as we wound our selves into the fabric of the festival’s glitterati.
“Was your person a late bloomer?”
Dog-Man stayed by us, no longer dancing just stood, and I don’t think he saw me when I looked at his eyes, but I saw him. I could see it all.
“I think you are Paul!”



What I could see in Dog-Man’s eyes was all the other times. All the festivals and the nights out and the parties and work-dos and social gatherings and walks in the park, everything, all of it, all of the time. I mean our group was now somewhere around 20 men strong, we were all there for her, and all of us, I mean all of us loved her.
She was Dog-Man’s girl. We all knew it but still we followed her, hungry for her favour. He was cool, content. He had to be. He knew she was his and he was secure with that, but still, all the attention she got had to hurt him, at least a bit,
“Guess Who?” had finished, turns out we were both Paul, apparently the game before they were both Hector, spooky eh.
As night became day again MDMA became Ketamine and once again we found our self back on the Bails, this time pinning the pyramids down with our backs and trying to kick holes in the sunrise, Ketamine was a new one for me, I’d always turned in down in the past, I wasn’t sure what to expect, I understood it to be a horse tranquiliser, so I assumed it would be a bit like being really stoned, and I smoke fucking Reaper weed so in theory I should be cool.
Reality of it isn’t actually like being really stoned; it’s more like slowly turning into a semi-flaccid sex lizard with a penchant for massive moments of transcendental hallucination, and no actual control over any of your muscles or motor functions,
Kieran and Ed were masters of it, using it to aid there ability for abstract movement and interaction, I on the other hand was Ketamine’s bitch, unable to leave the safety of our pyramid, unable to communicate,
unable to move, kind of alert, Dog-Man at side, watching over me, protecting me, his presence, strangely comforting, As she approached he left, just me and her, alone, surrounded,
“I think I’m going to tell you my poem,” she said.



The actual words I don’t remember, an offhand reference to forcing her legs open, some talk of not being held back buried in implications of innuendo and emotional baggage, to be honest my mind wasn’t in any condition to be processing information but I read between the lines and her sentiments hung with me long after the moment had passed, She was just too many stories.
By the time the idea of self-motivated movement became a reality, the sun was well and truly up and we cursed that big orange bastard for the warmth of his smile,
Tea or tents, the consensus set, the group divided, We, the strong, onwards to the specialist tea-tent in which I do my professional talking, to see about the plausibility of free chai, Them, the weak, home to sleep in what is essentially a coffin-sized canvas bag, I did not envy the uncomfortably humid, awkward slow-boiling pseudo-sleep of the weak, as far as I was concerned they were idiots.

Chapter Four

Saturday is a patchwork montage in my short-term memory, but here are the highlights.

Free tea, turns out all I need to do is ask, part of my entitlements as a Tea-Tent artist is all the free tea I can consume, although as I ferried the twelfth cup of free chai across from the counter to my carnivalesque collection of cohorts the geezer working the earn did point out that I shouldn’t take the piss,

Refreshed on free tea or perhaps just prior to it, (the events I mention may have happened in a completely different order) but at some point around then, bathed in an early morning light, we were crossing the bridge over the lake when we spotted an opportunity for mischief, by the edge of the water was a small 2-man rowing boat with a tired looking girl at it’s helm, a home-made fan in her hands and oars slung like burn matches at her feet, I was first, over the barrier onto the outside of the bridge’s exoskeleton and onwards into the boats soggy belly, seizing an oar I began to paddle,
“Look I’ve stolen a boat and a girl,”
The girl herself good humoured and attractive enough to allow validation to my claims,
Point made I positioned myself again akimbo to the bridge and climbed out, as my weight left the boat I realised the synchronicity of my timing, my exit had coincided exactly with the Party-Dog’s entrance, and as I clung to the bridge looking back out across the lake, the boat was already well out of range, the now bemused girl actually shouting for genuine help,
Party-Dog stood fully erect, feet pressed into opposing sides of the boat’s wooden guts, paddling in stereo, an oar in each hand and a look of pure determination on his face, splashing towards the pirate-ship that lived in the centre of the lake,
Having reached the rubicon of his projected voyage Dog-Man stopped rowing, he raised the oars aloft, let out an inaudible scream and threw the paddles into the water, the girl’s head sank in her hands and Dog-Man recklessly danced to our encouraging cheers,

At some point that morning we were back at the trailers awaiting the onset of more Suffolk folk, this included the arrival of Eddy,

Eddy had the uncanny ability to just find what ever you wanted, literally he was like a womble.

I said at one point that I needed a masquerade cat-mask and within moments Eddy was pushing one into my hands. The same was true of drugs, He found more drugs in one evening than we had been able to consume in the previous 2, good to have him on the team.

Eddy had arrived with his sister and her friend around mid-afternoon, and with out a wristband in sight just strolled into the festival, bad-man.

Armed with new friends and fresh clothes we again pushed our way through several layers of reality and back into the heart of the festival, main stage, Bloody-Marys in hand for a much needed boost of vitamin goodness, we danced to Brazilian Baile-Funk like wild animals, wounded and cornered by that big orange bastard we danced frantic as fire, vibrating to the sound of electronic bass-lines and 4 Brazilian teenagers screaming about things we probably wouldn’t relate to, in a language we definitely couldn’t understand.

Later having replenished vital water supplies it was time to satisfy our hunger for more female interaction, back to Zebra World.

Zebra-world wasn’t a world at all, it was however an area that we had become fond of visiting, it was situated part way across the peninsular that served as the first half of the bridge crossing the great lake that divided the festivals 2 sites, and was inhabited by the sexual zebras. A group of about 12 well toned girls and 3 or 4 sexually ambiguous lads who spent all weekend dressed in one-piece tight-fitting zebra leotards, when asked what it was that they did, it was explained to us as any thing zebra related.
Basically they just looked good as zebras and that was enough to earn them what must have been 20 free tickets, still we spent a wile counting their stripes and watching the stretch of their outfits as they performed a variety of zebra-related fun for us.



That night there were fireworks and the pirate ship was set on fire, spreading feelings of anarchy through the impressionable festival populous.

As Saturday night reached boiling point the pursuit of fun had become a dangerous marriage of inappropriate adventure and drug-fuelled stupidity.

We were once again atop our spiritual home at the summit of the pyramid looking down on a drop that only 24 mind-bending hours ago had been viewed as well fucking dangerous, but was now being seriously discussed as something we could jump.

Deliberation went on for long enough for Ed to wander off returning with what he described as a landing seat, the seat it’s self was made from hexagonally arranged aerobics balls sealed in a tarpaulin skin, more trampoline than crash-mat, but never the less it was positioned at the bass of the bails.
Dog-Man was first, leaping wildly into the air screaming his familiar reassurance,

“Ooooooooooohhhhhhhh Yeeeeaaaaaaa…….”

The impact of the seat cutting his call to silence before ejecting him onto the surrounding grass, Dog-Man sprung to his feet alive and apparently unharmed, and so we followed, one by one jumping onto the makeshift safety of the seat.



She was the first to be hurt, her landing had taken a seated position and the subsequent impact of her body against the trampoline had pushed her knees into her face, chipping one of her teeth and leaving her nursing a whiplashed neck for the remainder of the festival.


At this point Ed decided it was probably time to stop, although the rest of the festival didn’t agree, we tried to advocate concern for the possibility of serious injury.

But alas our words fell on deaf ears and it wasn’t until one unfortunate Irish lad who had demanded it didn’t finish till he’d had his go, ignoring Eddy’s advice about quitting wile we were ahead, had leaped through a miss judged summersault and rebounded into a dislocated shoulder. His screams acting as an I-told-you-so to others as we dragged the landing seat back to where it had come from,

We put a bit of distance between us and the bails and settled in an empty leopard-print activities tent on the opposite side of the site, Eddy went foraging and Kieran arm wrestled Dog-Man’s girl.

I think Kieran would like to say that he let her win, but I don’t think that was the case, as they lay with their fronts to the ground hands interlocked, she looked like knotted nautical rope, like she had been drawn by marvel comic-book artists, like every muscle in her body had been made to work for this moment.

Kieran looked like he’d be lucky to make any of his muscles work at all and as if he had been sketched in crayon by a five-year-old child.

Sure enough following a valiant effort on his part she wiped the floor with him.

We decided to try and gather as many people as possible in our tent, our technique being to cheer as strangers passed and once their attention was forthcoming we’d collectively beckon them inside to chants of “one of us, one of us” once inside each must perform for the amusement of the group, this improvised cabaret including a piano/beatbox/giant chicken three-piece who became our house band, one of the sexual zebra boys doing some zebra stuff and a guy who’s act consisted of him punching himself in the face as we counted out loud.

By the early part of Sunday morning we must have spoken to about a third of the of the festivals cast and we had cemented ourselves upon there memories, I personally lost track of the names of the majority of our new friends, one name I did remember however was Badger. Badger was a good-looking 22-year old Cambridge girl whose straw-like main of wavy blonde hair would probably have arranged itself into a kind of dreadlocks by the end of the summer.

When I asked her the origins of her name she shrugged it off as relating to the fact that she was really into blood-sports, especially badger-baiting and a friend of hers had found it funny to call her Badger, she changed the subject and skipped over it like it was nothing.

That shit blew my already fragile mind, Badger carried on talking but I could no longer hear her. Instead my thoughts were occupied with the idea that there was this underground sub-culture of attractive middle-English girls who got their kicks by going out into the woods throwing smoke grenades into badger sets and waiting at there entrance with raised shovels ready to stove the little bastards faces in.



When questioned she explained that she was only winding me up, but I couldn’t shake the image of her dressed in formal eveningwear stood in the forest, legs either-side of the entrance to a burrow, hoisting a spade above her head like the sword of Damocles, an angel of death for all two-toned forest rodents, it wasn’t till after she’d left that I realised I never had discovered the true origin of her name.

Sunday morning found us once again exploiting the potential for free tea, only this time it came at a price, it seamed that my forth and final set of professional talking was due and I was ushered onto stage and unleashed upon an audience in a condition not best suited to performance.

At one point I remember phasing in and realising I was actually stood on stage with a tent full of people staring straight at me.

Closer reflection allowed me to realise I was in fact mid-poem, I listened to the automated words as they escaped from my mouth, assessed my position and consciously carried on.

Apparently I had previously practiced enough for me to enter auto-pilot and perform my work without actually being aware of it, I tried to explain this to the crowd after concluding the piece but the look on their collective face said my efforts at explanation were wasted on them.



Finally after what seemed like an unreasonable amount of time the administration removed me from the stage and I was free to go.

After this moment, my memory is worn beyond the point of recall, although I do remember admitting defeat.
My last memory of Sunday night was myself Kieran and Ed strewn across a low hey-bail suckling spiced-cider from the corner of a carrier-bag, the bag itself was held by a group of 15 year old girls who were in the middle of selling Dog-Man a handful of pills.
This was the end for Kieran and I, we could sink no lower, and we retreated to the safety of the trailers.
Ed, Dog-Man and Dog-Man’s Girl stayed out, hungry for one last dance.

Chapter Five

Monday morning began at 5.30 am when I awoke under an unfamiliar van in a car-park far from the convenience of my tent.

I gathered the tattered pieces of myself under one arm and set about fighting my way through the malaise of reality between me and my canvass anti-igloo, as I packed my things and prepared to retreat to the eventual dream of my own bed, I reflected back on the events of the previous few days, to be honest even at this stage I struggling to arrange them into any kind of sensical order but one thing was clear,

The admiration and respect I had for Dog-Man.

At the high point of our popularity there had been around 50 people in our group, mainly men, she was magnetic north and we all followed her, pointing our compasses towards her, blinded by aurora borealis, desperately reaching for her arctic circle but destined to freeze to death on the icy tundra of her sociable demeanor.

She had destroyed many men, but don’t get me wrong, she wasn’t intentionally evil, not by a long way, what she was, was too close to perfect, and there in lay the problem.

She didn’t mean to be hurt anyone but as one lad had stated during the early part of Sunday morning.

She must have broken so many hearts, girls like her don’t come around everyday, girls like her don’t generally exist.

I mean there is no doubt in my mind that every man who met her that weekend remembered her name and I’ll bet her image was re-imagined in the hard-drives of innumerable wank-banks for weeks to follow, as an army of her devoted, heart-broken victims beat a one-handed applause to her memory.


When I saw Dog-Man on that last morning, he no longer wore the suit, he was just a normal man, his eyes hung heavy with lack of sleep, and his body was slumped through exhaustion, we bid each other an awkward farewell and they drove away, back to their Cornish home.