The rain puts paid to our going out early. Fran conjures up tea and bacon sarnies before we head into the festival, through plenty of big puddles, wearing wellies. There are new stages since I was last here – the Queen’s Head, which is mostly a disco, and ‘Dirty Boots’ where bands play every hour but are not listed in the programme. You have to check the blackboard. We head up to the John Peel stage to see Fucked Up (I fancied a bit of Regina Spektor first but was outvoted – it’s a longish haul to what used to be the New Bands stage). They make a lot of noise. Their frontman is a very shouty exhibitionist. He entertains the crowd in every possible…

The plan is to set off around eleven but we’re on Belbin time (soon to be Glasto time). I’m with sister, Fran (+ her partner, Chris: his first Glasto), and my youngest brother, Rich. They’ve driven over from Sheffield. The four of us set off at one, following the official route suggested for camper vans (Fran and Chris have just bought a 26 year old Hymer). While waiting, I’ve read a Twitter friend’s account – it took nine hours for him to do the last 25 miles. So we’re amazed when, six hours and one pitstop later, we get in to field E11 with no queuing whatsoever. We have a drink, meet the neighbours, put up the awning and tent. And then it starts to…

I’ve met Barry a few times but this was my first visit to his house. And, while I knew his fine poetry, I’d never read any of his novels, until the Shoestring reissue of his second, ‘Joseph Winter’s Patronage’, which I finished on the train journey to London. It’s a terrific, absorbing novel, fast moving, multi-viewpoint, beautifully written, about the rage and passions of old age, all the more remarkable given that Barry was only in his early thirties when he wrote it. The novel is dedicated ‘To Bryan’, the remarkable experimental novelist BS Johnson. For a time, Barry lived in a building (pictured above) in the square where he now lives, which was later occupied by BSJ. Nearby, a few years later, Barry was…

My friend and colleague Michael Murphy died yesterday after a long illness. Michael, who was only in his early forties, was a fine poet and a lovely man. I wish I’d known him better, but shortly after he started to work at Nottingham Trent he was laid low by the brain tumour that was to cause his death. I last saw Michael in August, at the National Wildflower Centre in Liverpool, where he lived. He was launching a pamphlet of poems, ‘Allotments’, written during his 2005 residency at the centre. Michael was in good form that evening but, when we talked, had no cause to be optimistic. His was a heartbreaking long goodbye. To the left is the one decent picture I snatched, of him…

A few words about the images above. They’re wordles. A ‘wordle’ is a web tool that allows you to see how frequently words appear in a given text. You can tweak your word “clouds” with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. Do your own here. I’ve pasted in the 3000 words that make up the afterword to the new edition of my best known novel Love Lessons, which Five Leaves publish later this month. The result is above, giving you a flavour of the new afterword. The higher wordle (with the brown background) is what happens when you put in just the first page. Double click to see a bigger image and check out the differences between the two. I was going to publish an…