The Big Chill

I arrived at Heathrow at around 9am. After a very long line through customs, I got through to the airport and activated the SIM card on my phone. Unfortunately, the SIM card would not activate right away, so I found my way to the tube station. Upon boarding the train, I asked the first person I saw if this was the correct train. Fortunately, the person I asked—a rather attractive American girl—was very knowledgeable and just said “follow me”. Eventually I made it to Brixton, but my phone was still not activated. I found my way over to a phone booth and gave George a ring. As it happened, two of his friends—who were going to be driving us to the festival—were in Brixton on their way to George’s house. Ollie strode up, looked through the crowd thinking “okay, look for an American, look for an American, look for an Americ—right there” and walked right up to me.

“Are you Ian?” He asked.

“I am! Are you the cab driver?”

“Cab driver? No, I’m a friend of George’s. We’re here to pick you up.”

“Oh, okay then.” And off I went.

We made it to George’s house, and I immediately hopped in the shower. After that, we had a cup of tea and then headed out to the festival.

The festival was at a place called Eastnor, which is Malvern Hills near Worcester (which I finally learned how to pronounce). Unfortunately, with traffic we ended up taking six hours to get there.

But arrive we did. We parked in the north car park, and ended up hiking probably a mile and a half to our campsite. We met everyone, wound down a bit from that long car ride and then headed out to the festival proper.

The festival was fantastic. On Friday, Roots Manuva played. Saturday was the Portico Quartet, who were absolutely astonishing, and then a lot of dancing. And on Sunday, Portico Quartet played again—but in a smaller tent—and we caught Leonard Cohen at around 9:30pm, who was just brilliant. We left him for maybe 15-20 minutes to go watch this house sculpture—which had been sitting across the pond all weekend—burn up in a fantastic display of pyrotechnics, after which we went back to the remainder of Cohen’s set.

I met a lot of great people (two of whom even invited me to stay in north England sometime; an offer I intend to take them up on), saw a lot of great things, and all in all it is an experience I’ll never forgot. (Not to mention a fantastic introduction to England!)

Yesterday morning we arrived back at George’s house in south London, utterly exhausted. We started watching some Heath Ledger movie that had downloaded on the DVR, but it wasn’t really that good, and we were still tired besides; I ended up falling into an impromptu nap and didn’t wake up again until 8pm.

When I did wake up, Jo was home. We had some Japanese delivery and jasmine tea, which was quite lovely. I swear, though, that I have never had as much tea as I have since I arrived in England. Not that I’m complaining, mind you, but it has certainly been noteworthy.

After dinner we retired to the sitting room and watched Human Traffic, a great movie about club culture in England in the early 1990s. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend doing so.

After that, we all went to bed, and I had the best night’s sleep in a couple years. Now I’m up and we’re getting ready for a day out in Camden to see a friend’s band play. Should be fun!