Gong show

I forgot to tell you about the festival. I don't really do them anymore, not liking cold, camping or outside toilets, favouring getting off my face and listening to music in an urban environment in my old age, but something about staring at 4 walls all week whilst waiting for the tradesmen to turn up made me a bit stir crazy, and when Rach rang suggesting Beachdown I found myself on a train to Brighton before I'd really thought about it.

It was really beautiful there, on Devil's Dyke by the sea. You had to hike up and down the hills to get to the stages and the stalls, so felt strangely fit and virtuous despite all the rock n roll substances floating around. One of our friends has just been through chemo and is not allowed to drink, but had brought with her some hash brownies. Hadn't done any of that in years but what the hell... 'I can't feel anything' 'No, me neither' 'No, I just feel really normal' then we realised we were all shovelling food into our faces at lightning speed, like starving wolverines.

It may have also been the reason that they managed to persuade me to pay £25.00 quid for a 'Gong Bath' in the therapy field. A man with a shaved head wearing a lot of tie-dye invited us into his teepee (using gestures, he was under a vow of silence over the occupation of Tibet) where we lay on yoga mats with airplane blindfolds over our eyes, while he, er, played gongs over us for an hour. We started off as instructed in the yoga pose of a corpse (laying flat, hands up) but it was bloody nippy lying on the ground in the teepee and gradually, everyone ended up shivering in the yoga pose of a foetus, desperately trying to conserve warmth. It was quite relaxing I guess - the gongs were supposed to, er, do something to your brainwaves and it was similar to dreaming. Bloody hippies.