"Light 'em up!" - Glastonbury 2009 moments

The Boss
Has to be top of the list. A 3 hour set! (He went over the agreed curfew but Michael Eavis is apparently happy to pay the £3,000 fine from his own pocket, so much did he enjoy it).

Boss: "Hey Stevie - if it's not curfew time, what time is it?"
Little Stevie: "It's Boss time!"

Lots of people whinged about the fact that they didn't play Born in the USA. Um, so? They played Thunder Road. They played Glory Days. They played Born to Run. They played No Surrender. They played Dancing in the Dark. They played The Ghost of Tom Joad. They played Working on a Dream. They played Radio Nowhere. They played Hard Times. They played Because the Night. They played Badlands. They played The Rising. (I cried). And loads more. The set was a set for fans, and the whingers were clearly not fans; when the band struck up Glory Days, some mudwig next to me shouted "Come on, give us something we know." If you're not even fan enough to know Glory Days, what are you doing taking up space at the very front of the audience?

Bruce was off the stage (down in the crowd) as much as he was on it. He gathered up all the fans' song request signs and held them up to show which song the band was about to play. It was touching how genuinely excited he was to be at "Glaston-berry". He kept shouting to the stage crew to "light 'em up!" i.e. put on the big old lights so he could see the audience better. And he can still rock it like he's back in 1970s Asbury Park. Legend.

Rod Laver
From the sublime to the ridiculous. I rounded up all my Geoffs down in Cabaret on Saturday afternoon; I convinced them all it was worth the effort to see the excellent Welsh comedian Rod Laver. We got there only to find his spot had been rescheduled for an hour later. Never mind; we set up camp in the humidity and heat, and then settled ourselves down in the auditorium and waited for him to come out. It was at that moment I realised the excellent Welsh comedian is called Rod .. something else. Rod Laver is - I shit you not - a man who juggles ping pong balls with his mouth. It was quite a long way from what we were expecting. But actually, it was bloody good. The old Big G fates at it again.

Geoffing hell
In an effort to put something back this year, seven of us wore capes with a single character on the back of each one, spelling "G E O F F ' S". Geoff's capes. Geddit? Lots of people did, although not the young 'uns. (The future of our country is in the hands of people who've never heard of Geoff Capes!) On the first night, with great excitement, we wore our capes out to the Park. Sitting around drinking tea, a man approached us. "Are you Santa's elves or what?" he asked. No, we said, we're Geoff. Geoff Capes. We showed him our appliqued letters. "Oh-ho!" he said. "My name's Jeff!" and proceed to turn around to show that (freakish Glastonbury coincidence) - he had "J E F F" appliqued on to *his* back. Seriously - 90,000 people on site already, and within 5 minutes we've found someone else with J E F F appliqued on his back. So much for originality. And it got weirder - during the hilarity that ensued another two Geoffs turned up. We only found about 5 Geoffs all weekend - but so many in the first 10 minutes.

He wears a red bandana...
Lovely Paolo Nutini did a lovely set in lovely Croissant Neuf on Friday afternoon. We got to lie in the sun eating Fayre's Fare cakes and listening to his beautiful bluesy crooning. And he did a fab cover of "Down in Mexico". Niiice. And at the other end of the spectrum, we done ourselves a bit of a Quo - got to do my 'Rocking all over the world' dance all over again (having done it with John Fogerty in 2007). I like it, I like it, I like it, I like it, I li-li-li-like it ...

Sightings
Didn't do too bad on the celebrity front this year: Beth Rowley queuing for the Ribbon Tower. Marcus Brigstocke making his way into the thick of it for Bruce Springsteen (he went right past me but I did not have the presence of mind to compliment him on his actually-quite-impressive beatboxing with Shlomo and his Mouth Orchestra!) The bloke who played Thomas Tallis in the Tudors stuck his tongue out at me at JazzWorld. And I think Lil Chris walked past me in Greenpeace. Pete thinks Naomi Campbell was just behind him during the E-Street Band .....

On the non-celeb front, I love all the street performers or just other amateur dress-up punters - Glastonbury is just one big magical spectacle. This year I think my favourite was the imaginary bowls players. Genuinely middle-aged people all dressed up in bowls whites and bowling imaginary balls. And shouting warnings to people - "Mind that [imaginary] ball!" - much befuddlement ensued; brilliant. Also liked the two County Show commentators who just sat in a corner of the Circus field and commentated on whatever went past. God bless you all.

Everything else
will follow when I've recovered some additional memories. Expect stories of late night rainpours, one way systems, lightning, good food, bad food, various types of cider, socks, bandstands, toilets, posh teenagers and maybe the one about the magic tape.

I captcha the castle

Recently, I've been getting a bit fed-up with the captcha on the Connotea site. Unlike various grouchos, I am quite happy with the Connotea interface and functionality in general. But I find their captchas particularly hard to read, and it frequently takes me multiple attempts (5, in the worse case so far) to guess, for example, whether a character is a "1", an "l", an "i" or a "j".

Upon whingeing about this to colleagues, I heard about a captcha test requiring the user to assess whether a drawing was of a dog or a cat.

Where will it end?

Before we upload your posting/bookmark/comment, please confirm that you are not a computer by telling us: Is this elephant fulfilled, or is he yearning for more in life?

Shaggy Blog Stories, or, easy ways to avoid wearing a red nose whilst nonetheless assuaging your conscience

Choosparp alerted me to Troubled Diva's rather marvellous idea for celebrating Comic Relief this coming Friday, whereby British bloggers are invited to "select one post from their archives" and submit it for publication in Shaggy Blog Stories: a collection of amusing tales from the UK blogosphere, "a paperback anthology of blog writing" to be published on Friday in aid of Comic Relief.

Seizing this opportunity to support the cause without donning the silly appendages, I submitted this old favourite of mine. My hair may be too close to my face, lady, but at least I don't have a red nose.

Copies of the book should be on sale on Friday at lulu.com I believe. Will have to check then whether I've made the (hair) cut!

The final instalment. Finally.

Of the holiday stories, that is, not the whole blog...

So, I last updated you from Te Anau where we were looking forward to celebrating NYE 13 hours ahead of our friends and families back home. We went out for a grand meal and then headed to Te Anau's Fiordland cinema to see Ata Whenua, a simply amazing piece of cinema showcasing the very beautiful Fiordland region of South Island (part of which we had spent the previous day sailing). It is such an incredible part of the world, and the film really does do it justice.

Unfortunately, I then went down with a stomach bug and didn't even last till midnight, which was a miserable disappointment :( The bug lasted for the next few days, which was (not) fun given the amount of travelling we had lined up....

I will gloss over our last night in NZ, since I was ill and my dear father-in-law had booked us into the scuzziest hotel I've ever been unfortunate enough to stay in. Whatever you do, folks, avoid the Glenorchy Hotel in Glenorchy (unless you are in search of the world's smallest en suite, have a surplus of lightshades which you need to offload, or enjoy it when people throw parties outside your window). The good news is that we were only there for one night; the bad news is that when we left it was to begin a 27 hour journey, involving 5 airports, 4 planes, and a whole lot of grumbling on my part.

Things definitely looked up when we finally reached our next stop, the glorious, delightful, luxurious Palm Cliffs House Inn near Hilo, on Hawaii's Big Island. This was quite the antithesis of our previous accommodation; a whopper of our room, with its own lanai (veranda-type-thing), jacuzzi, blessedly comfortable king size, DVD player and extensive dvd library, and roar of the ocean right under our window. Ahhh, we were set for many days of rest and recuperation.

Nonetheless we did manage to haul ourselves out of bed each day to head out and discover a bit of Hawaii (the "Big Island", after which the state was named by Big Island-born King Kamehameha). It has a quite different character to the other, more touristy/resorty islands, and certainly the east and north sides that we explored were very unspoiled and still redolent of Hawaii's plantation heritage. We came across some wonderful scenery and some lovely old buildings (and yes, you've guessed it, the pictures are all on Flickr - here's one of my favourites, from somewhere up in the Kohala mountains:)

And here's one that probably looks a bit more like you'd imagine Hawaii:

All in all, it was a lovely, chilled few days and a fitting end to a great trip. Happily, our month away felt like just the right amount of time for me and I was actually looking forward to getting home by the end. And 10 days on, it feels like we never went away .....

Happy New Year!

So much to add despite having only posted yesterday ... where to start ...

1. The NZ photo set is finally all sorted and labelled. You can view the whole set here; here's a couple of sneak previews:

Just landed, and about to hike on, the Franz Josef Glacier

Driftwood in Bark Bay, Abel Tasman National Park - about to tramp the track down to Torrent

Portage, where we spent a couple of happy, chilled days at the beginning of the trip

2. We're now in Te Anau, where we will celebrate New Year's Eve later with the sort of knees-up that entails food, drink and fireworks. It's strange to realise how close we are to leaving (we shall be Hawaii-bound on 2nd Jan).

3. We spent last night on a boat in Doubtful Sound. What a perfect excursion. The biggest operator of this type of tour is "Real Journeys", but their boat (whilst quite visually fetching) is huge and sleeps about 70. We went with Fiordland Cruises, a much smaller enterprise whose vessel the MV Waverley sleeps only 12 including 2 crew. Our party consisted of a British family of 4, an American family of 3 and the 2 of us - which made us a feel a little at a disadvantage, until we turned that into an advantage by befriending the crew. Skipper Dave and First Mate Chris were a fine pair of good ol' NZ boys and we felt honoured to be in "their gang" (e.g. we got to eat at the "captain's table"; we got first dibs on a freshly-roasted crispy leg of lamb, going spare while Chris cooked dinner; they even shared their private wine and whisky supplies with us when we ran dry - which I have to note is because I had shared around the 2 bottles of wine we took with our companions, giving away I guess 5 glasses in total, and we got a measly half glass in return! Tsk!) The Waverley took us right out to sea and then back in via various coves and detours along different arms of the Sound (which is actually a fjord, misnamed by British or Dutch sailors who had never seen a fjord before! - the doubtful bit comes from Captain Cook, who did not enter the Sound because - due to the direction of the prevailing winds and the angle of the Sound's entrance - he doubted he would be able to get out again without rowing, which he didn't fancy). Anyway - Pete did a bit of kayaking off the stern, I took lots of photographs (of rata trees in bloom, of blowsy waterfalls, of soaring forested hills on either side, of birds and water and sun and moon and so on ... might be able to add these to Flickr before we get back). We enjoyed a fabulous meal cooked on board by Chris, including delicious NZ lamb and - for those who like this sort of thing - fresh blue cod caught by Dave during the trip. We stayed up late listening to yarns about (amongst other things) the legendary heli-hunters of the 1970s, who used to shoot deer from helicopters, to claim their bounty from the Department of Conservation - deer being an introduced pest (effectively) in NZ. Sounded like a thrilling but dangerous job - the heli-hunters might find themselves being shot at by hunters on the ground, who were p*ssed off that the heli-hunters were swooping in to take deer that ground hunters might have spent hours stalking. Later, when the deer ran low and some bright spark decided to capitalise on the strong market by beginning deer farming, hunters were paid even more to take female deer alive (NZ$3000 each). Tranquillisers being useless (because you couldn't adequately gauge the size of the prey), hunters initially used to *jump* from helicopters to land on the deer and wrestle it to the ground - many died in so doing. Later a net gun was invented, but this carried its own disadvantages - a hefty kickback which was enough to dent the metal casing of a helicopter! And so on.. lots of great stories. My favourite quote of the evening could be this one from Chris, on aging: "When I was younger, I used to shoot a deer in the bush and carry it out on my back for 2-3 hours. I can't do that now ... I've gotta shoot 'em on the edge of the bush these days." What a great euphemism for getting old - "shooting on the edge of the bush".

Well, could probably keep rabbitting on with stories of a great day/evening/morning (early start when Dave started the engines at 7am!) but had probably better get on with today's adventures (a nap, a "cinematic experience of Fiordland", and some NYE festivating) rather than writing endlessly about yesterday's. Might manage another update before we leave NZ, but if not, it'll be Aloha from Hawaii next time!