And the Caravan is on It's Way...

We went to the fiftieth Cambridge Folk Festival, headlined by Van Morrison. It was quite a saga. We started out with a convoy of ten friends and somehow ended up at the back. Someone has to be. Halfway there a passer-by caught my attention in a small town to tell me that one of the caravan tyres was flat. At this point we discovered that the ancient spare had all but perished and was not serviceable. All our friends were almost in Cambridge by the time they realised we weren't behind them...

The caravan cost us £150 about twelve years ago. It is a sixties antique and despite a bit of maintenance every year it is getting a little ropey. Unfortunately it also has a very unusual and outmoded wheel and tyre size. It took nearly three hours, an immense amount of self control and a certain amount of prayer before I found my angel....they aren't always easy to find in the motor trade...but finally a good bloke in a tyre shop in Thetford managed after many attempts to solve the problem and come up with a pair of new tyres.

From there on it began to improve.

There was a lot of warm sun and one spectacular downpour.
I discovered a great New York band, right up my street, called Hazmat Modine.
There were a lot of relaxed afternoons with friends sitting in the sun, reading the paper and listening to Celtic folk music.

My highlight of the festival was getting right up the front to hear Van Morrison and his band. This in itself was quite a feat of persistence given the crowd and the heat of the evening. But it was well worth the physical suffering. He was sublime and his band were terrific.