Glastonbury 2005 - gratuitous non-violence...

...not to mention public exhibitions of beauty, and wanton exchanges of smiles between total strangers and even - horribile dictu - between adults and children. Glastonbury Festival spells the end of civilisation as we know it.

And while the mainstream press look through the bars of their cages and see nothing but mud, normal people see stars - and not just the musicians - Van Morrison, the Wailers, Seize the Day, Zap Mama and others too many to name, but the stars who made the place beautiful with flags and hanging baskets and arches and willow frogs and little green nesty nooks and the looneys in the white horse that danced and the liittle family of gnomes and the couple who danced weightlessly on the edge of a 30' cone and the people who sold the crepes and the cuisine and the people who craft flowers out of wood and windmills out of wire and feathers and the people who make dragons and horses out of old bits of tin and and BUT

not just the makers and the cookers and the gate and traffic and security and Michael Eavis himself BUT ALSO all the 125,000 who came and sang in the rain and played and trudged (thlick thlick thlick on all sides we trudge from place to place)in the mud.

Mainstream journalism is mud obsessed but the truth is the main problem with mud is that it makes it more difficult to dance. But it can be done. Here is how:

Let one of your legs (preferably the less rhythmic one) bed itself down nicely in the mud. (Do not fear if it feels as if the mud has got it forever - it can be prised out later, or if it is a wellie you can take your leg out and then get down and scoop the welly out with your hands. Then go and have a free solar shower at the Greenpeace stand). Let one leg bed down in the mud, and use the other one to dance with, tapping out the rhythm with a heel-toe, to-fro, onestep double tap foot tap whichever suits best, while wiggling the pelvis as necessary.

I was thinking I should blog this from the festival itself but saw no internet cafe ( no doubt there is one there) and anyway only a sad git would sit at a keyboard while Glastonbury Festival was going on outside.