And yet another festival....

Yes, I got back home from Edinburgh on Wednesday evening, unpacked my bag, packed another bag and headed off on Thursday morning to a farm just outside Swindon, to S*gar Hill Festival, which as Festival Administrator this year, amongst other things, had been taking a great deal of time up. And causing oodles of stress, for reasons I won't go into. Last year, the first year, we had about 300 people at most, and made a huge loss....


This year we put more money in, spent more on bands, infrastructure and marketing, and hoped...slowly the ticket sales trickled in. I was running the on site box office, and on the Saturday, sold 10K worth of tickets. Excellent. I think we had over 1,000 people on site, and they lvoed it. The sun shone, the bands rocked and everyone was happy.


Except....for the four hours I spent assisting the police with a 'tired and emotional' lady alleging a nasty attack..I seem to come in useful at such times...then there were the horse drawn travellers who joined us...interesting situation, quite complex, ended up being David's and my problem, like the A team, they were all ours....Monday was a tense day, with the farmer wanting them gone, me and D making friends with them, sitting with them, swapping e-mail addresses (how the f*ck you have an e-mail address in a traditional horse drawn wagon I don't know, but there you go...)


We promised not to leave til they did. They wanted to stay..the farmer wanted them to go..we trusted them, relied on our new friendship, prayed they wouldn't let us down, prove us wrong...then, about 7pm, they hitched up their horses and left, coming to say goodbye to us and apologising for causing us stress..I nearly cried...they were seen as the enemy, and I can understand why..everyone breathed a sigh of relief to see them go without confrontation..D and I are invited to join them at their Autumn equinox meeting....I wonder if we should get a horse for the caravan????


So, some pix of the festival......