Well, where to start.

First off, our first ever festival got cancelled on the second day and went bankrupt so we didn't get paid for anything. That's 5 grand-ish down the hole, so it's in the hands of our lawyers.

The next day (after being dragged off site in three vehicles due to the mud) we pitched up at the Glade festival near Reading. We set up, built the kitchen, got ready to go and then several things went wrong. I made a trip back and forth to Bristol twice and we made many supplier drops. Then Thursday night happened. We had 5 inches of rain in one and a half hours. Luckily our raised floor we built at great cost and transferred 100-odd miles survived and allowed us to keep serving all the way through.

However we then had hideous mud for the rest of the festival, which meant supplier deliveries arriving half a mile from our kitchen and needing carrying by hand the rest of the way. And we were feeding over 1000 people that weekend. That's a lot of food.

We did it though, and lasted until Monday night when it rained again and I had to walk across the festival to get a tractor to drag our vans out of the mud. I took a wrong turn and blundered on the festival site while chatting to GGTW. It took 20 steps before I realiased I'd blundered into a swamp. With water coming over the top of my wellies and unable to walk (and with my desperate cries for help going unheeded) I had to drag my feet out one by one (falling over several times) for 50 yards before finding the car park and wading through a foot of mud to reach the tractor queue. We got dragged off at 22:30 on Monday.

We were at Womad at 8am Tuesday to set up again (I was soooooooooooooooooo tired already) and were serving by Wednesday lunchtime. However they'd placed the marquee at the bottom of the hill despite our protestations so when it rained on friday it flooded again and our raised floor saved us again from stopping serving. It was still an inch deep yesterday :(

In the end they blew up the road over the brook to stop us being inundated. That was cool :)

So overall I lost a lot of money, had many low moments I never want to see again, had several high points I'll never forget, met 20-odd people I'd hug in the street tomorrow, had some amazing nights letting my short hair down, made firm friends with several people, proved I could run something like this and break even (without bankruptcy anyway!), and above all had a year's worth of experience in two and a half weeks.

Hopefully photos to follow and the more amusing stories. As it is, I'm off to Dublin tomorrow morning when I may see Jen (should she ever answer her phone) and hopefully the two Irish girls who worked Womad again :)

I'm sooooo tired and still mentally disabled from 18 days in a muddy field doing 24 hour shifts, sleeping 5 hours in a tent in the blazing sun (yeah, right) then working another 14 hours or so. I've lost two stone in 2 weeks and and rather thin now at 11 stone. I'm sure a few beers in Dublin will sort that out :)