Festival run down

3 festivals in 3 weeks must be a world record. I had not been to any of them before so here's a pocket-sized review:

The Big Chill, Eastnor Castle
Quality of Music: 8/10
Toilets: 7/10
Price of a pint: £3.50
Queue Factor: 4
Summary: Lovely setting in the Malvern Hills, pretty much everyone dressed up and a fantastic vibe. Not so much about the music as the party atmosphere.
Highlights: The heard of human zebra, Kruder & Dorfmiester, Hexstatic and Norman Jay getting the whole place dancing on a sunny Sunday afternoon.
Would I go back? Definitely

Field Day Festival, London
Quality of music: 0/10 (couldn't hear it)
Toilets: 0/10
Price of a pint: £3.50
Queue Factor: 10
Summary: Lots of uber-cool musicians in the fashionable heart of London's East End. Only 30 toilets for 10,000 people and over a 1 hour queue for the bar. When we did finally try and see a band the levels were so low we gave up and went to the pub, where we had a great time.
Highlights: None
Would I go back? Only to key the organiser's new Porsche which he bought with the proceeds from this year's event.

The Green Man Festival, Wales
Quality of music: 7/10
Toilets: 9/10
Price of a pint: £3.00
Queue factor: 2
Summary: Absolutely gorgeous setting surrounded by the Brecon Beacons. Mainly folk influenced bands, lots of tasty food and a tiny 6,000 capacity. Probably the closest you'll get to how Glastonbury was back in't day.
Highlights: Robert Plant (especially when he played Whole Lotta Love in the encore - aaaarggh!), Findlay Brown, The Broken Family Band, Vetiver, Richmond Fontaine.
Would I go back? Maybe. Great music and all, but after a while I was hungry for a riff and there was nothing to do once the music stopped.

We've just got back from a Central European road trip organised by Tom, Ben and Wadey for their collective 30th birthdays. 13 people on a mini bus was a bit of a squeeze, especially on the first day when we covered over 1000km from Ashford, Kent to Bautzen, Germany. Otherwise top notch fun. Highlights included:

• Visiting 5 countries in one day
• Auschwitz
• Krakow, Poland
• Levoce, Slovakia
• Frisbee Golf
• Budapest, Hungary
• Ljubljana, Slovenia
• Growing a moustache

Sign of the times

It was great to see so much coverage of Glastonbury over the weekend. On BBC 2 and 3 continuously with two more options on the red button this must surely have been the most televised live event in the history of broadcasting. Regardless of all the moaning about commercialisation and losing its 'edge', the popularity of Glastonbury and countless other festivals throughout the summer is something I see as a wonderful reflection of the creativity and positivity in the UK today. I'm old enough now to remember a rather different country, which was trying to bash youth culture over the head with a big stick.

I was going to have a whinge that it was a shame, with over 200 bands playing (most of them British :D), we got endless repeats of Lily effin' Allen, Mika and a BabyShambles set where the camera focused more on Kate Moss, but it could be a lot worse.

Whilst Sara was in the hairdressers at the end of our street on Saturday a nut nut decided to stab a copper in the chemists. Cue 20 police cars and a chopper. While they chased the man into the cemetery Sara was stuck in the shop. I was at home moaning about the noisy circling helicopter distracting me from inspecting the newly-seeded lawn. Once they caught the guy a fleet of "BicyCops" were dispatched to guard the crime scene. I played with the idea of nicking one of the bikes and instigating a low speed bike chase but, some may say cowardly, I took a photo instead.

I wish I got out to see live music more often, especially some of the hundreds of hopefuls which can be seen for a few pounds in countless venues across London. It reminds you that whether a band makes the big time or not is a fine, fine line which has little to do with the quality of the music, but more with what's fashionable this week.

Granted, the first band were rubbish (a homogeneous mash of Brit Indie from the last few years), but they played it well and was still ten times more entertaining than another night in front of the box.

The next two bands were altogether a different story. Beeches (fronted by a certain Mr Hayes), I had not seen since their second gig well over a year ago and was mighty impressed by how good they have got at banging out unashamedly unfashionable Pixies inspired punk rock.

Finally, Kill Electric, who I initially wrote off for looking a bit nu-electro, were cracking too. If you live in London, you can pay around £25 to get a glimpse of a big time group from behind the back of a 6ft dude with an afro (whilst dying for a piss because you've drank one £4 can of Red Stripe). Or you can go and see three or four bands (in arguably the best city in the world for live music) for a fraction of the price in a pub that sells beer in glasses. From now on I will be trying my best to do the latter.

"One each floor, on either side of a narrow communicating stair, a range of shadowy galleries opened out fanwise, along one of which came a chambermaid carrying a bolster. I applied to her face, which was in the twilight, the mask of my most impassioned dreams, but read in her eyes as they turned towards me the horror of my own nonentity."

Marcel Proust - In Search Of Lost Times

Nick Drake sits comfortably within my all time top five favourite musicians - I never tire of listening to his achingly beautiful (and incomparable) melancholy folk. Fontana are releasing a collection of his unreleased material on June 19th which has every chance of being a stack of deflating cast-offs that should never have be uncovered. However, if the rest of the tracks are anything like "Blues Run The Game" available as a free download on Pitchfork then I for one can't wait to hear them.

We finally got the Internet connected at home this week. Clearly this was far too much excitement for my latpop as it "had a shit" (as we technically minded say) and has to be sent off for repair. So until normal service is resumed in a few weeks, here's some Canada Geese and their goslings I daringly photographed on the Grand Union Canal which I cycle along to get to work.

And finally...

I had my BBC induction course last week. The highlight was a tour around Television Centre culminating in the news studios. After my brief appearance presenting the News at Ten I walked around a corner and collided with Jeremy Paxman who briskly apologised then walked away purposefully while I hung my jaw in the air like a moron.

Not quite there yet are we Dave?

The Green Avenger aka David Cameron aka Blair Lite's recent goof has proved that he sees "saving the planet" as no more than a velvet coat tail he can ride into power. In January he flew 90 miles (return) by private jet from Oxfordshire to Herefordshire - a journey which would have taken 2 hours 20 by car.

The fridge is open

(Moving house at the moment so no time to write anything)

Comic genius

Adam Buxton provides the voice over to a sign language interpreter on BBC News 24

Friday Matinee Movie

Jaws in 9.23 minutes, filmed on Super8 by a team of twelve year-olds in 1978.

Don't believe the truth

I watched "The Great Global Warming Swindle" tonight on Channel 4. It claimed the truth (that man is having no effect on the temperature of the planet) has been hijacked by political activists and self-interested climatologists. Well argued with lots of graphs and clever people explaining complex subject, it reminded me of the incredible power (and pointlessness) of statistics. Someone has got to be wrong. If the experts on the programme were correct it shows how easy it is to prove the complete opposite with exactly the same set of data.

I agree that there is a real sense of mania around green issues right now and without all the scare stories (papers to sell, people) and catastrophe movies coming out it would never have the momentum it does. But regardless of whether CO2 emissions are harmful or not the consequences of the eco-frenzy created by the issue are wonderful. Would anyone like to tell me how producing less pollution, recycling and generally being more thoughtful of the consequences of our actions is such a terrible thing?

This polarised debate is not doing anyone any good as what cannot be denied is that the general state of our planet is undeniably linked to human activity. We are affecting a lot more than just the air temperature by gorging on its limited resources just so we can try and make ourselves happy by buying mountains of crap we don't need. Unfortunately, this show will give environmental sceptics a warm glow of righteous justification tonight.

The Word Development Movement

I've been interested in the whole globalisation/capitalism debate for quite a while now. I've read a decent amount of books on the subject including the excellent "Globalization and Its Discontents" and am strongly of the opinion that the way we have things set up that make us all so wealthy (and house prices so high *grumble*) is what is keeping the rest of the world so poor. From what I've read and also seen in my last year away there really isn't much going on to even the balance. Unfortunately many charities appear to be sadly misguided in their execution. For example, NGOs in South East Asia have a reputation for driving around in air-conditioned SUVs and living in gated communities. I also get the feeling a lot of the money ends up disappearing in corruption, which is absolutely rife in places like Cambodia and being bled dry by crazy bureaucracy in somewhere like India.

The World Development Movement is different. They're not about funding idealistic projects which are supposed to "empower" poor communities, but pressure "decision-makers to stop policies that hurt the world’s poor". Donating money to them goes towards things like producing campaign resources for protesters and toolkits for parliamentarians. They have been very successful in raising awareness in issues such as the disastrous privatisation of water companies in places like Tanzania and Guyana which are being pushed on developing countries by organisations like the IMF and funded by our government.

What's even better about WDM is that you can actually take part. They have four groups in London alone. This isn't some extreme left wing group (although I'm sure it attracts a lot of weirdos). Its about our politicians and companies paying more than just lip service to all the shit they spout.

Blog 1.0

I'm planning to build my own blog, but its probably going to take a while so I'm using Blogger for now. I'm a Web Developer by trade, using Microsoft's .Net environment, but rather than doing the easy thing and building it in the language I've been writing for 3 or 4 years, I'm going to learn Ruby - an open source programming language which my friend Joerg says has "changed his life". Good, I've said it now so I'll have to do it.

Bienvenidos

This isn't my first blog, but it feels like it.

Sara and I virtually wrote a book in the time we were away, but for some reason that doesn't seem so self-indulgent. At least we were doing pretty interesting stuff. Who wants to read about a life of work, getting drunk, playing footy and complaining about the price of housing? Well you don't have to do you? I'm gonna do it anyway...