Arrival....

Three scorching days in the sunshine listening to great talented rock bands in a festival lite environment is a highly enjoyable experience. With headline acts that will be hard to match on any bill and a chilled out, happy, friendly, diverse crowd it was a great weekend, even if it should be renamed the Lynx festival, due to the persistent over use of the all girls prefer dry guys advert.

The main thing we noticed as we arrived at our new home for the next few days was the people. It was Friday and already it was packed. A sold out festival really is a very full one!

The second thing you notice is that okay your tent is a short distance from your car but the arena is a good twenty minutes walk away. Fantastically a new friend has reserved a space for our tent and sacrifices watching the SFA to help us find the pitch.

Here we realise is the first problem, the various parts of the campsite are undistinguishable. There’s no zones like Reading or map like Glastonbury and so despite being in the same field it takes a while to find a landmark to find each other. I should point out at night this problem disappears as the towers all have strings of different coloured lights on them.

After pitching our tent we take a walk to the festival via wristband exchange to get our camping wristbands. Yes that’s right we get our wristbands after we entered the campsite. Quite how this happened and how we entered the campsite is due again to lack of clearly marked entrances and a car park marshal telling us to ‘follow them’ and finding the crowd we follow go through a gap in the fence. Too laden down to skirt around we follow them.

The start of our Arena experience is a surprise but the same for all arena festivals we hear the queue is nearly half a mile long and took hours to process everyone with armbands and check for glass and cans.

Anyways we walk along the main road to town, the oncoming traffic have been diverted to that the whole Town has become one way and enter the site. The beers all bought with tokens, and having learnt my lesson from festivals with these in the past we buy only enough for a round each time. But unfortunately there’s no cider, not even in cans! So it’s beer or lager. As Carling are the sponsors we get Carlings and survey the site.



It’s a clear night and the last cloud of the whole weekend scurries off with the sunset. The lights of the funfair with it’s big wheel and ball thing that fires you far to high into the air at silly speeds add to the festie feel as the food stalls flicker on and off with the power appearing to be intermittent, well it is an island! We enjoy the ‘Phonics and head back to the campsite for the usual intermittent firework and call of ‘Bollox’!

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