Cambridge Diary 2006
Alice Ralph

Saturday

8:15am
Saturday morning at Cambridge Folk Festival! Quite possibly one of my favourite days of the year. We are up in time for our second Sainsbury’s breakfast, and return to our tents full, suffering from lack of sleep and facing heat exhaustion even at this hour. Bea lies on the floor and after a few minutes I realise that she is fast asleep and no amount of poking or pulling is going to wake her up. I even fetch a wet towel to throw at her but she in unresponsive. In the end I resort to a tantrum and rolling her around until eventually she seems to come to a little, and I drag her off to catch the bus. Fabulous as the shuttle bus is, it is far too hot trapped in a crammed double-decker bus in such temperatures and now I am feeling the heat wear at me too.

12:30pm
We catch a little of Julie Fowlis before sprinting to the Club Tent for William Elliot Whitmore. It is the first time in all my history at the festival that I have ever managed to fight my way into the tiny tent, but that is probably due to the heat that has forced everybody in the place to collapse in a collective heap on the floor. I sneak my way to the front to take some photographs and spy on his magnificent rockabilly-style tattoos; he reminds me of a Grease character blended with somebody out of O’ Brother Where Art Thou… or maybe Deliverance, but perhaps that’s just the banjo. We stay just long enough for me to decide that I want to buy all of his CDs – before I spot how expensive they are. My brother also turns up, relaying that Mum is back at the tent feeling ill. We don’t know it at the time but it turns out to be catching.

2:15pm
Tom appears, brandishing two day-rider tickets for the local Cambridge bus-routes, and the three of us head into the city centre. It is not until after I step off the bus and begin to notice the strange looks thrown my way that I realise I am wearing this year’s official FATEA t-shirt that reads “I LOVE CAMBRIDGE” across the front in large letters. Feeling like a misguided tourist fashion-catastrophe, I retreat into the safety of a public toilet to borrow a different t-shirt off my brother for the duration of our time in the city, but change back later. The irony is that I designed the Cambridge t-shirt myself, but found myself too embarrassed to wear it when surrounded by thousands of fellow tourists who, unlike my festival-goer kin, were throwing worried looks my way. The city, as always is beautiful, and Bea and I found a little arts and craft fair to browse around, but still the sun was glaring down on us and we crawled back onto the bus, leaving Tom to continue his work as a Cambridge city tourist. I take his t-shirt until I get back to the main site and feel comfortable enough to change. Here I can shout my love for Cambridge from the tent-tops and not get weird glances.

5:30pm
Bea and I explore the stalls once again – Bea gets a henna tattoo with the purpose of shocking her mother when she gets home, and we spot some street theatre making it’s path through the crowd; a Cambridge punt on wheels, complete with over-exaggerated “chaps”. That is the magic of Cambridge Folk Festival: you never know what will make its way onto the stage, or through the audience, next.

7:20pm
Once again, I find myself in the photographer’s pit for Seth Lakeman, and once again a no-show on the fiddle front. I am sorely disappointed, but the audience adore him and it is hard not to like his earnest and energetic performances. It may be about the twentieth time that I have seen him play but he is as fantastic as ever.

7:40pm
I get a text message saying that now Bea has gone back to the tents because she felt ill. My mother has recovered but everybody seems to be suffering from heat exhaustion and dehydration. As if to add even more drama, we receive a panicked phone call from Tom who got on the wrong bus back from town and found himself at the last stop on the route and in the middle of a field a couple of miles outside of the city. Luckily he manages to find his way back, but for a dramatic few minutes I think that I have lost my 16-year-old brother to the Cambridge bus company’s Lost And Found. I calm my nerves with a houmus burger from the vegetarian Moon Café, before dashing back to the media caravan to photograph the John Butler Trio.

8:25pm
Now this truly is unbelievable. I find myself crushed into the photographer’s pit, between a heaving crowd of roaring fans and some of the most incredible musicians I have ever seen play, including a drummer who keeps winking and laughing at me, much to my bewilderment.  I nearly get hospitalised by a man with the biggest camera lens imaginable, but it is a fantastic experience, if not least because I get to see John Butler play from such a close vantage point.

9:45pm
I meet up with Bea, now slightly recovered, and Tom, relocated but still somewhat traumatised by his ordeal, and the three of us head to The Folk Café to find that the computers are shut-down (I was suffering from internet cold-turkey by this point) and nobody is playing in The Hub yet. We buy hot drinks and huddle around a table to doodle on flyers left by previous customers, in particular “fiddle” jokes over the Seth Lakeman flyers. Suddenly a massive gang of what I initially mistake to be WWF Wrestlers, but turn out to be security guards, invade the café. We cower in the corner, but alas! One of the biggest and meanest looking guards has spotted us and is walking our way! He takes my hands (I fight the urge to scream for help) and touches my fingertips with his, stares into my eyes (I decide to make eye-contact – I don’t want to look suspicious or shifty) and tells me he is “looking for a connection”. When he has found the connection, he asks me to shake my hands out and then clench them into tight fists, and obviously I nervously comply. This is the freakiest part; he takes a lit cigarette and butts it out on the palm of his hand (seriously, this guy was like Terminator!) and asks me to open my hands up. I do, and on the palm of my hand is a circle of cigarette ash. And with that, my David Blaine-meets-The Rock friend dashes off into the night. I told you that you can never tell what will happen next at Cambridge Folk Festival. I’m still recovering from it.

Continued