Glastonbury 2011

A ringing, in annoyance more than in alarm, like a child untended, emanates from the dashboard above the vacant driver's seat. But I don't tut or roll my eyes or look over my shoulder or even flinch. I sit still, slumped against the window. I reach into my mud encrusted shoulder bag and root out my tattered notebook and a pen I picked up in a Dublin hotel, it's gold livery diminished by time, Gresham Hotels. As dusk falls, I see a right-handed version of myself reflected, scribbling something unintelligible, a great truth, no doubt.


As we chug over dimpled farm land, I am lulled gently, and like the fading day and burgeoning night I am in a gloaming of my own, between waking and sleep. The old bus struggles up an innocuous incline; gears crunching, cogs grinding, progress stalling.


There are voices of muted protest, an unwillingness to leave is expressed by some. Every corner is accompanied by a glacial creaking as if the rear of the bus is itself a reluctant passenger. A particularly acute right-hand turn presses me further against the window, the impression of my cheek upon the glass more definite.


With blackened fingernails, irradiate skin, soiled clothes and sunken eyes we pull up to the terminus, where five days previously we began our journey. From here, on to a home cooked meal, to a shower, to a bed.


Later that night as I lie, in near silence, just the sound of three days and nights of music ringing in my ears, it feels as though I have yet to fully emerge from a land of mud and rain and sun and cider that I was, initially, so reluctant to visit.


The next morning, breakfast, and then lunch, feel like an hallucination. Now of course, two days on, my memory is like that of a dream but with one discernible difference; I still can't get all the muck out of my fingernails.