For those happening on this post because they’ve come to check out the new song of the week, you’ll find two new mp3s below and several more over the last three posts. This is an anniversary repost of my Glastobury 2000 diary, which appeared on my original, long deleted website. At the end of this final post, there’s a post script saying that the novel I was researching there has been commissioned. It was, indeed, published the following summer, although there was no Glastonbury that year. I also promise that I’ll write a diary about writing the novel. I never did. Perhaps, when I’ve got time, I’ll add a few reflections on the novel and Glastonbury. Meanwhile, here’s the final diary entry from ten years…
Here’s the third part of my tenth anniversary repost of the Glastonbury journal that appeared on my old website ten years ago today, with four relevant mp3s to download at the bottom. PART 3 – Friday. Most common sound heard at Glasto after a mobile phone rings: “Hello, Mum.” It rained on and off in the night. I gave up trying to stay asleep at quarter to nine, made myself a cup of tea. I had a Frusli bar for breakfast (boring but nourishing). I put on my wellies and my heavily mud spattered Diesel jeans, then went for a wash and a pee before setting off for the Welfare tent, a long trudge away. I got there early and waited while head of Welfare,…
I planned to get on the road by eleven. The drive should take less than four hours and the worst queues were meant to be from four in the afternoon onwards. But when I got up, it was wet, and getting wetter… getting organised seemed to take longer and longer (“It’s like sending someone off on a school trip” Sue said later). As I got to the point where I was actually ready, Sue suggested that I leave it until Friday as it was so wet. I refused to be tempted, finally setting off at twenty to one. I got a decent route print out from Routemaster on Sue’s laptop which I followed. The first three hours of the journey were a doddle, apart from…
I’m not going to Glastonbury this year, though, of course I know a bunch of people who are, and I’ll be avidly watching as much as I can on the BBC. So there’ll be no new entries in what has always been this site’s most-read feature, my Glastonbury diaries, the 2003 and 2009 versions of which can be found by searching the archives. It was the most-read feature on my old website too, but the links to those Geocities pages have long gone, since Geocities closed down last year, taking 38 million pages with it. Some of those pages have been archived, but when I searched for ones from my old site (which ran from 2000-2003) I couldn’t find them. However, today, just in time…
For my first post proper on this blog, I want to deal with one of those things that I’ve meant to write about before but has always seemed too petty. Indulge me while I go a bit Nicholson Baker. One of the trickier aspects of getting older is whether to change your name. All Davids (except the insufferably up themselves ones) are Daves in their youth, and remain ‘Dave’ to people who have known them since then. But, at some point, we ‘Dave’s have to decide what name to go by professionally. As a schoolteacher, in my mid 20’s, I chose to go by ‘Dave’. It would have felt pompous to do otherwise. Then my first short story was accepted for publication. A fortnight later,…