Festivals from the comfort of your own home - well, Galtres festival anyway. May contain mentions of rain...

Just in case any of you have been wondering how I've spent my time this weekend - come on, I know you all think about me when I'm not here, you just don't like to say anything... I've been attending the Galtres Music Festival. It's local and it's not Leeds or Reading, but last night we did have Maximo Park (who I luuurrrve) playing! In the mud and the rain! Just like a real festival!  Except that, because it's just down the road, I can come home and sleep in my own bed and not in a tent where everything gets all clammy and damp and smells of feet.  Although, come to think of it, my home is pretty clammy and damp and does, occasionally, smell of feet...

Anyway. This festivalisation has meant many things.  Not enough sleep, cider that could strip the keys from a piano, music and bouncing, mud, bacon-inna-bun and rain. Lots and lots of rain.  For some reason, a year that has been mostly kind in the summer department has chosen this weekend to dump six months' worth of rain every evening between the hours of approximately 7pm and midnight, carefully calculated to do maximum damage to any attempts to be fashionable or cool.

Look, for example, at this.

Ignore my son's attempts to photobomb the picture.  This is your typical crowd, watching Johnny Borrell, ex of Razorlight. Note the hats, the coats, the extreme wellingtons worn without fear.  Typical Festival goers, in other words; it had to be one of the few places where your pint refilled as fast as you drank it, but becoming progressively weaker as you went on.  At least, I think that was what was happening, after a while I couldn't feel my feet any more and I went blind.

The beer tent.  The last thing I saw before my vision failed.

Maximo Park, the whole reason I was there, dancing and bouncing around in wellingtons, a dog-walking coat and improbably hat, like a yak-herder on a gap year.

And now, if you'll excuse me, the Stranglers are playing tonight and I have to get my frogman's suit out of the packing crate...