Alice In Festival Land

I have been gracing Cambridge Folk Festival with my presence every year since I was 12 years old, and 2004 was officially, or in my opinion anyway, the best yet. Okay, so that’s only 4 Cambridge’s attended in my vast 16 year-old history, but that’s still one quarter of my life-thus-far, and on that ratio I consider myself quite a veteran. Back to my original point, Cambridge Folk Festival 2004 was by far the best yet. Possibly because it had better weather than past attendances (heavy showers, anyone?) and possibly because I’m finally at an age when I can appreciate “boring” music (i.e. anything slow or without obscene lyrics). Not that I’ve ever not enjoyed a Cambridge. I just finally understood why it’s lasted 40 years, this time around.

Every year I swear I won’t do it again, and every year I repeat myself; I started this year’s festival by crawling out of bed at 5.00am. Quite why my family find it necessary to start at such an unheard of hour is puzzling to me. Perhaps it’s the many hours of driving we have to do from Poole to Cambridge. I drove with my dad (or rather, he drove, whilst I controlled the tape-player and looked up amusing place-names on the UK road map – to my delight we actually drove though Shingay-Cum-Wendy.) Our voyage was, as always, eased by a brief stint at a Tesco café; my family eagerly await our all-day breakfast-on-the-way-to-Cambridge for the rest of the year.

 Probably the main reason why Cambridge rates slightly above other festivals on my personal festival-rictor-scale is the fact that you can camp by your cars. Nothing beats knowing that if something horrific happens to your tent or sleeping bag, you don’t have to hike 20 miles back to the car park to get some dry clothes or your AA-manual or whatever it is that you require. On top of that, if you’ve ever attended Glastonbury, for example, you’ll know that the worst bit about the entire festival is having to carry every single item you own (or is it just me who rates my entire wardrobe as more important than the tent?) over various hills, puddles, and the odd passed-out festival-goer, just to get to where you want to camp. But camping by your car solves that pressing issue.

So, after smacking my 14-yr-old brother a few times with the tent poles and not getting at all stressed when he tried to start constructing the tent from the last instruction in the manual backwards, the Ralph family had finally arrived. And it was hot. Not just cowering-in-the-fridge hot, I mean REALLY hot. At which point we felt it obligatory to hop on the bus (another ingenious travel solution by the festival-planners, might I add) and make our way to the main site. I caught the end of NOI.D, who were not as young or small as the pictures in the programme would have you believe, but still impressed me in the two or three minutes I saw of them.

Continued