Tom Robinson’s performance was an experience to remember. My mum, clutching her Guinness, dragged me into the middle of the audience and sang Glad To Be Gay as loud as she possibly could into my ear. And no, I was neither shocked nor appalled; I’m used to my mother’s lack of  shame in public places. Even I tried singing along for the sake of it but I obviously take a long time to pick up lyrics, as I was pretty out-of-synch with everyone else. But still, I thought he did an excellent set, and thought his ranting was as good as any Rock Against Racism nights I’ve been to before (I later found out that he helped found that movement which was eerily bizarre). And yes, I’d go see him again.

However, the priority at the festival for me came early, on the Thursday night, which Thea Gilmore’s set. We squeezed (or rather, battered) our way to the barrier, and she did almost all her best material, including Rags and Bones; I pretty much set that song on repeat on my Minidisc player for about 4 months at one point. The only thing I would say is that Thea Gilmore is definitely my winter-soundtrack – I would have enjoyed the set more if it were snowing. But the fact that even my eyelids were sweating in that heat didn’t dampen the fact that I thought she was excellent. And, at only 10pm, but already a 22-hour day behind me, I crawled into my sleeping bag.

 Like I said before, my family have a bizarre knack for getting up at ridiculous hours. Every morning, my dad rushed off to the swimming pool at 8am for a few laps whilst my mum dragged the rest of us off to Sainsbury’s for £1.99 café fry-up. Friday, however, was officially branded The Day Of Shopping (very important, no matter where you are in the world), and my friend Holli and I somehow managed to find our way into the city centre with the help of some adult-supervision in reading of bus timetables. An interesting day followed, which I won’t go into detail over, but basically consisted of multiple trips into all the high-street shops we have at home, only these ones were bigger, various ice-cream tasting sessions, and the all important purchasing of waaaaay too many Ani Difranco albums (the Ani obsession is not good for my health or my wallet).

Back on the main-site, they had secretly plotted to rearrange the order of the timetable whilst we were away just to confuse us. And confuse us they did. It took us a worrying long time to work out that the two guitar-wielding men onstage were not, in fact, the female-fronted Spanish Amparanoia that we were expecting to see when we arrived back at the site. But both were still truly fantastic, but unfortunately slightly outperformed by the spectacle that was The Dhol Foundation. That truly was something that only Cambridge Folk Festival could give us. Impressive, loud, and more than anything, awesome, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. I stayed at the barrier for Loudon Wainwright III, who despite being almost the opposite of the previous performance, in all his one-man acoustic glory, was almost just as good. And the image of Loudon Wainwright III and Steve Buscemi visiting the Hank Williams Museum together is just too amusing (or should that be, surreal?) to be true, quite frankly.

Continued