It’s almost Festival time again
Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

In my previous life as a professional photographer, I once shared a balloon ride with Michael Eavis of Glastonbury Festival fame. Michael had commissioned me to take some aerial photographs of the Festival fields after everyone had gone home to prove to Mendip District Council that he hadn’t broken any planning guidelines. One warm summer evening in early July 1984, three of us set sail from Worthy Farm in a black balloon with the CND logo emblazoned in white on three sides.  After drifting over the Mendips the pilot began looking for a place to land. We started to descend quite quickly onto what looked like a promising field.  While the pilot managed the controls Michael and I looked over the edge of the basket and saw the rather alarming sight of the twin barrels of a twelve bore shotgun pointing directly up at us. An incensed farmer was screaming ”Don’t you f***ing hippies dare try to bring that thing down in my cornfield” Nothing focusses the mind more than being surrounded by large four propane cylinders, with only a tiny wicker basket, four hundred feet of gravity and a trigger happy landowner between you and your maker.