how i finally fell in love with summer festivals

(plus the story of a very weird thing that happened to me in the loo)

I went to Little People last weekend. It’s the same festival I went to last year with my friends Georgie and Ben. For years it was held in an empty farmer’s field near Oxford but it’s now been relocated to crumbling old manor house in Somerset, which made me somewhat apprehensive — would it be fancy and crowded, thus ruining the intimate care-free vibe? Thankfully, not at all.

Little People was still tiny and still unlike any music festival I’ve ever been to before. While last year it felt like an extended bonfire, this time it was more like a house party without small talk, or a wedding without all the speeches and hats. One stage, one tent, maybe three or four hundred people at most? Excellent music, relaxed, friendly people, sprawling fields, stands of ancient oaks, food you actually want to eat, quiet places to camp. The crowd was a bit older, by which I mean my my age, which gave it the kind of giddy, manic energy you can only get when a critical mass of guests have paid more money for childcare than their tickets actually cost, thus ensuring good moods all round.

The native British are obsessed with music festivals in summer. It’s a whole ‘season,’ in fact. (There are so many ‘seasons’ here it’s hard to keep up, especially for a country without discernible seasons in weather terms.) After after nearly two decades, I’m finally beginning to understand why. At worst, music festivals can be vulgar, expensive, uncomfortable, filthy and loud enforced-fun, but when a festival comes together (as Little People does) it’s a bit like a religious ritual for godless people. Summer festivals mark passage of time in a cyclical way without carrying the emotional weight of family gatherings — a bit like school holidays for adults.

At some point in my forties time began began rushing past at bewildering pace. Has this happened to you? For me it felt like a tap being slowly turned from a dribble to full-gush. The reason, I eventually realised, was that I never simply ‘hung out’ anymore. Like ever. I was always doing something or meant to be doing something. Often I was freaking out because I was not doing the thing I was meant to be doing whilst doing something else. I began to lose track of my car keys, my diary, and eventually who I actually was. I was bleeding out, the years were draining away too fast to be staunched. I needed a transfusion, but how to stop time? It’s not that I managed to accomplish this feat at Little People, but I had a chance to wander around and think and enjoy myself without responsibilities of family or work which was precious and rare. For two solid days, I did literally whatever I wanted when I wanted, which as it turned out wasn’t very much.

I don’t seem like the festival type to most people. I’m not a hippy or a raver or a rocker. I don’t signal ‘alternative lifestyle’ in the way I dress or decorate my house. But like almost every soft-section journalist of my generation I started out as a kind-of-music-critic and was sent to cover loads of festivals in my twenties, not because I was die hard fan but because unlike everyone else in the newsroom I had no children and didn’t mind sleeping in a tent. I went to all the big ones in Canada and America during those years, including the notorious end-of-days disaster that was Woodstock ‘99. It was just as awful as the Netflix documentary suggests. Gangs of frat boys walking around with signs that read, ‘Show us your tits for water.’ I left before Limp Bizkit burnt down the stage and filed my story in the parking lot of a Dunkin Donuts. After I got moved off the festival beat I didn’t go to another for ten solid years.

Then, in my late 30s, my English husband persuaded me to come with him to Glastonbury for the first time. I went reluctantly and expected to hate it but I didn’t at all. The thing people don’t understand about Glastonbury is the dizzying scope of it. It feels almost impossible, like a utopian pop-up-city in the middle of the English countryside. The line up is excellent, obviously, but that’s not really it. It’s all the other weird stuff taken together with the music that makes Glastonbury astonishing. There are entire fields full of people getting married or doing breath work or people just sitting around… carving spoons. I don’t mean dozens of people but literally hundreds of people carving wooden spoons in the same place at the same time for absolutely no discernible reason at all. Meanwhile, half a mile away, Beyonce is performing. But the spoon people are perfectly oblivious to this. If you want, you can join them. Or you can go watch Beyonce, nobody minds either way. Plus there are tents full of kindly old hippies where you can stagger in with your hyperventilating university friend and say, ‘He says he swallowed green pill that had a snake head on it?’ And they’ll say, ‘Oh dear, yes that one’s been going round. Martha will do her cranial sacral and bring him right down.’ Anyway, I love Glastonbury. If you get the chance — go.

Little People, by contrast, is similarly magical because of how teeny-tiny and undiscovered it feels. Because of this I forbid you to attend (just kidding, I’d love you to come). It seems almost impossible that such pleasurable experience on this little island would not be completely overrun and sold out, but there’s nothing exclusive about it. I bought my ticket online the day before I went. There are literally no queues.

The old manor house was owned by a highly-sociable elderly Lord who wandered round the place in a summer suit with a bottle of champagne giving tours to anyone who asked. The walls of the house were covered with oil paintings and antique weaponry, taxidermy and framed newspaper clippings attesting to the Lord’s scandalous youth (including complaint letters from boards of various private London member’s clubs). There were hardly any roped off areas or rules and the guests were, for the most part, very polite and well-behaved (though apparently a couple of WWII grenades went missing — if you stole one be careful, karma dictates they might still be live).

I did my usual festival thing which is to chat to people, dance for a couple of hours then crawl into my tent and collapse just after midnight, causing everyone to text to see if I’m ‘okay,’ which this year I was. I then spent most of the next day napping off my hangover in a meadow and scouting out somewhere to swim with a friend. After a long walk we discovered a clear spring-fed fishing pond on the grounds, hopped the fence and swam under a pair of weeping willows, gasping from cold. A large carp rudely head-butted my thigh and I welped.

Last year I went to the same festival for just 24 hours and it was absolute bliss. Almost all of my happy memories in the past two years are like that: Fleeting moments of relief in a prolonged state of anxiety and stress. This year was different, more civilised, and not just because of the manor house. Halfway through the weekend I realised was happy in a calm way that did not seem wholly disconnected from the rest of my life. For one thing, I didn’t feel tormented about leaving the boys with a childminder, and I did so for two whole nights instead of one. It’s not that the source of my stress has gone away (the ongoing legal cases, the chaos, the unresolved loss), I’ve acclimated now. My life could be better, more sorted, but it could also be much, much worse. For the first time I actually believe what everyone says: That eventually it will sort itself out.

Uncertainty is a funny thing. Beyond the day-to-day admin of life which must be attended to, there really no point in struggling to get everything correct all the time. The more you try to organise yourself five years or ten years in advance, the more you’ll be plagued with terrifying questions like, But what if I can’t get insurance next year or the Thames barrier breaks and we all die in a flood or Trump wins the election or interest rates go up or my kid flunks his exams or a meteor hits the earth reducing us all to fern food for the next generation of dinosaurs? Trying to guard against every possible outcome is a fool’s errand, like swimming against a rip tide. Once you surrender to uncertainty, or at least make temporary peace with it, you realise bold decisive action doesn’t always pay off. Floating along in the deadly currents while enjoying the view takes practice and wisdom. Giving yourself over to fate is a relaxing way to conserve your limited energy and time on earth. Doing nothing might just might just save your life. And if it doesn’t? At least you got to take in the long shadows of the sheep grazing in the meadow at dusk.

At the festival last weekend, I spent a lot of time wandering round the funny old manor house thinking about all the houses I’ve lived in and all the versions of myself I’ve been in them and, of course, the strange and mysterious passage of time. It was in this strange and contemplative mood on the last morning of Little People that I happened upon a framed photograph of a newspaper clipping from the society pages in the downstairs loo of the manor house. Gazing at it woozily (by this point I was quite tired) I realised with disbelief that the woman on the left of the clipping looked eerily like me. It’s not a flattering likeness and her hair is dark, but the resemblance is startling — don’t you think?

This caused my mind to dart into all sorts of unnerving places. I thought about dopplegangers, time-travel, ghosts and what little I can remember about how string theory works. Mostly though I wondered what sort of woman she was. Lady James Chrichton-Stuart. What a name. Imagine getting married and being stripped of all evidence what you were actually called at birth? I doubt I’m related to her. All my known relatives were vagabond horse thieves, emigrants from Scotland and Northern Ireland. Though it’s not impossible I guess — maybe she was a foundling? I wonder whether she enjoyed her life in London and whether she’d ever stayed in this very house? I wondered about the fabric of her days, whether she was busy or spent a lot of time hanging out. I wondered also whether the sour look on her face was ladylike distaste for the photographer or the expression of a woman on the cusp of a sly joke. I wonder if she loved and was loved, whom she loathed with a passion, what she ate and drank, how many paintings and houses and children and horses and orgasms and romances and friendships she had in her life, if any at all.

Anyway, that’s by far the most exciting and weird thing that’s ever happened in to me in a festival loo. Sorry it doesn’t involved sex or drugs. I hope you’re having a nice summer so far.

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