Chapter 31
June
“Have you been to the toilets yet?” Becka didn’t even try to hide the glee in her voice.
“No, Becka,” I sighed, “I have not, but I’m sure they’re fine.”
“They’re cubicles suspended over a hole in the ground,” she giggled, clearly enjoying the idea of my imagined discomfort.
“Becka, you were the only one who had a problem with the toilets, remember? I couldn’t have cared less, as long as the door closed.”
“Which it usually didn’t,” she pointed out, and I conceded the point with a reluctant shrug.
“These ones will be in a completely different area though,” I pointed out. “I’m in the press hospitality area. It’s a lot quieter. Not so many… revellers.”
“Yeah, maybe,” she scrunched her nose. “Did you get one of the RVs? I saw Tommy from Hot Spot got a whole one, just him and his photographer.”
I snorted. “They didn’t even assign me a photographer.”
I momentarily thought back to Patrick, who’d offered to come along with me, but as he was only a freelance photographer, they hadn’t considered the cost worth it when I had a phone. Ha. I’d do my best…
“So, no RV?” Becka frowned.
“No RV. Pretty big tent though.” I leaned back on my heels, looking around at my polyester-nylon domain for the weekend.
“How are they sending you to cover a music festival, and they aren’t even giving you a proper place to sleep!” Becka scowled, and I laughed.
“Sorry to disappoint, Princess, but this is practically palatial by Glastonbury standards.” I stood up, and twirled around to illustrate my point. “This tent is massive!”
She sniffed dismissively. “Sure, yeah, okay.”
“I don’t remember you moaning about tents when we did Glasto.”
Becka snorted, smudging the lip liner she was carefully applying.
“I was drunk the entire weekend!”
I threw my arms wide. “That’s the point!”
“I thought the music was the point?”
“A triangle has more than two points,” I said, nodding sagely.
“Oh yeah? What’s the third point?”
“Ask me on Monday.”
Becka laughed.
Initially, I had been worried that coming to Glastonbury on my own would make me feel a bit lonely, but boy, was I wrong. I was camped in a part of the grounds reserved for press and marketing, and my entire day had been spent bumping into people I’d met in my brief career.
Even though I was still a pretty junior journo, I’d spent my fair share of time standing at the back of venues with a microphone, recording the same interviews and press junkets as a hundred other journalists and feature writers, only to later go home and try and turn the same words into a different story, so to be sent on assignment to a music festival so world-renowned as Glastonbury was the dream.
Admittedly, I hadn’t been the first choice to cover it, but the events writer had gotten sick a few days ago and I was free, so, here I was. Every cloud has a silver lining, and all that.
This was the first time Glastonbury had been put on since the world took a two-year hiatus, and you could feel it.
Walking through the crowds of people, you could feel a difference in the atmosphere that was hard to explain.
It felt somewhere between glee, and anxiety.
A forced kind of brevity as people tried to be comfortable again.
Even though the country had been more-or-less open for a while now, it was still a bit unnerving to be around so many people.
In London people were more than happy to give you a wide berth – unless you were on the wrong side of the escalator in the underground – but here, in these sunny pastures filled with so many varieties of humans, it was startling.
But then, I reasoned, Glasto was always a bit of a shock to the system, and I tried to surrender myself to the ebb and flow.
Bumping into so many industry colleagues could have felt like one of those conferences we were dragged to twice a year, but something about strutting around a field in wellies, holding a lukewarm beer and feeling the back of your neck burning because you hadn’t applied enough sunscreen made it feel more like a school trip.
For an hour or so, I walked around the press area, taking in the lay of the land.
There were two types of journalists, I’d come to realise.
The serious types with BBC aspirations, and the rest of us.
Culture and lifestyle writers usually fell firmly into the second category.
Somewhere around late afternoon, I bumped into the small crew from Pebble magazine – a very much alternative publication – the type of folk you’d associate with healing circles at music festivals. Very much the Good Vibes crowd.
Once they’d realised I was on my own, they had immediately absorbed me into their bubble, and honestly, it was probably the most fun I’d had in so long I couldn’t even remember.
It had started innocently enough with a sound bath in a brightly coloured yurt, but some combination of the stuffy air, a mason jar of kombucha that tasted suspiciously like cider, and the hazy incense made me so sleepy that I missed half the main acts.
The guys assured me that they had enough footage to go around, and were happy to share.
I let them drag me off to a drum circle, where a woman who didn’t look a day under seventy told me that I badly needed to rearrange my chakras, with all the intensity of a doctor delivering the news that I only had days to live.
I politely thanked her, but declined her offer of assistance.
It was a miracle that I woke up the next morning in my lonely, 8-man tent with nothing worse than a raging thirst, and the desire to never drink Kombucha ever again.
I spent the second day actually doing my job – alongside day-drinking with my Pebble buddies, but in my defence, that was the price of entry to get an interview with some of the performers.
Just because I had a shiny press pass around my neck did not grant me immediate access to the hospitality tents – the nice kind, with roped-off areas and refrigerated drinks. However, Dave from Pebble was surprisingly well-connected.
“This is not my first ‘mudding’, little swallow,” he’d winked at me from somewhere under the fullest beard I’d ever seen in real life, using the nickname they’d all given me since I’d drunkenly – and leaving out the most pertinent information – told them the story of my necklace, the little gold swallow I’d never worked up the resilience to take off.
‘Mudding’ was the term some Glasto-veterans gave to the festival, owing to it’s much-loved reputation for occasionally getting so rain drenched that the historic fields turned into historic swamps.
All this to say – he knew people who knew people who could get us in.
Which was how I concluded my second day with a full file of backstage footage and interviews with no less than five acts.
By the third day, I was feeling spiritually cleansed – which was a polite way of saying dehydrated, covered in whorls of paint, and sick of eating out of cardboard.
I counted myself lucky, however, that despite Becka’s reservations, the press area washing facilities were a massive improvement on the ones in the general camping areas.
It was more akin to the shower cubicles you found in leisure centres, instead of a row of strung-up shower hoses, and even though the water was cold, I was able to shower in the privacy of a three by three enclosed space.
My elbows might never recover, but my hair didn’t smell like kebabs anymore.
Today was the last day, and it was going to be a weird one.
Sol8 was billed as the headlining act on the main stage.
This was a big deal for a number of reasons – not least of which was that no K-Pop act had ever performed at Glastonbury before, let alone headlined.
It was probably the reason I’d been second-billing to come.
Realistically, they could have sent anyone else, but because of my employment history with ENT, and becoming known as something of a K-Pop enthusiast, I topped that short list.
My editor wanted two pieces from this festival jaunt – the overall write-up of the festival, and specifically a shorter piece about the way K-Pop had broken into the festival scene.
Pebble had plans to be firmly entrenched backstage at the dance stage, so I was cast out on my own, which was in some ways a relief, because it allowed me to lock-in and not get distracted.
As entertaining as it had been to spend the past two days embedded in the alternative culture of Glastonbury, it was time for me to focus.
Sol8 weren’t on until much later, so I decided to spend the rest of the day wandering around the camp grounds, just seeing what there was to see without being pulled into every fire circle and chanting tent.
Glastonbury was a fascinating mix of people, and entertainment. It felt like little pockets of every type of humanity brushed up against each other, united in rubber boots and a love of music.
Being alone gave me the scope to really observe, instead of interact, and the experience was enlightening. I made regular voice notes on my little digital-recorder.
About half-way through the day, and after one full rotation of the whole site, an idea finally came to me as I was thinking about Sol8’s performance.
When the thought eventually settled, I was surprised it had taken me so long to think of it, but then, it had been – what, nearly two years?
I didn’t often consider how much time had passed, between what I had come to think of as the ‘before’, and now, and so when I did, it quite literally stopped me in my tracks – resulting in me almost being bowled over by a crowd of chattering teenagers.
I moved to the side to sit on a hay bale and to push my ephemeral thoughts into a more solid shape.
What were the odds that he still had the same phone number? It was common for people that high-profile to change them regularly. Was two years too long?
The longer I sat on the idea, the more anxious I became, until I knew that if I didn’t just pull out my damn phone, I wouldn’t do it, and be mad at myself for the rest of eternity.
Me
Imagine being in the same place at the same time. Cringe.
I immediately shrivelled inwardly, because who actually said ‘cringe’?
Just as my entire being was trying to melt into the muddy ground, my phone vibrated.
Tae
Who is this?
[Sent 18:42]
Bugger. Yeah, of course he’d have no idea. I’d changed my number when I left home. I smacked my forehead with my phone, earning me a concerned look from the young girl a few feet away.
Me
You used to call me Pom.
Somehow that felt easier than just admitting my name. Like, that way he could at least pretend he had no idea, and I could write this off as just one of those things.
Tae
KY?!!!!??????
[Sent 18:43]
I laughed in relief, and snapped a quick selfie doing a peace sign. I was giddy. He felt like a flashback, and it was euphoric.
Tae
I remember you being cleaner.
[Sent 18:45]
Me
You seem exactly the same.
My phone rang, and a rush of emotions surged through me too fast to process. Breathless, I pressed it to my ear.
“Well, well, well. What’s a nice boy like you doing in a place like this?”
“Pom! What the fuck! Where the hell you been, loca?”
I laughed loudly, grinning so wide it hurt.
“It seems to me I’m in the same muddy field as you.”
“Jesus, this world is so small,” he chuckled. “I’ve missed you, Pom.”
And hell if he didn’t sound like he meant it.
“I missed you too, chum.”
Inexplicably, I felt tears spring to my eyes, and I hurriedly brushed them away, and tried not to focus on how his voice took me back to a time that felt more like home than anything had in such a long time.
“Fuck,” I exhaled shakily.
“Pom, are you… are you crying?”
“What?” I cleared my throat, “No. I’ve got smoke in my eyes.”
“Smoke?” He sounded doubtful.
“Fire circles, man. They’re everywhere.” I attempted a laugh as I dragged my sleeve across my eyes and sprang to my feet, hopping lightly on the spot, trying to shake off this sudden melancholy.
“Hey, look,” I said in my cheeriest voice, “I’m writing a piece on K-Pop at Glasto. Can you help an old friend out?”
“Oh!” He sounded surprised. “Hang on, let me check with our manager.”
The line was muffled, the raspy scratch in my ear telling me the phone had probably been pressed to his chest as he did whatever he needed to do.
“Who are you writing for these days?” He asked suddenly, and I told him, trying to hear him convey the message through the muffled rasp.
“He says that’s fine, but it’ll have to be after our set.”
My heart soared at both the journalistic coup of bagging an interview with one of the hottest groups in the world, but mostly at the opportunity at being able to see someone I associated with a piece of my past. A past that felt more story than history.