Packing up and leaving the festival.

I hate to compare our meagre plight with that of soldiers in the First World War, but these lines came to me as I awoke on the last day of the Donington festival. They are from Seigried Sassoon's poem, "Counter Attack."

We'd gained our first objective hours before
While dawn broke like a face with blinking eyes,
Pallid, unshaved and thirsty, blind with smoke.
Things seemed all right at first. We held their line,
With bombers posted, Lewis guns well placed,
And clink of shovels deepening the shallow trench.

The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs
High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps;
And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,
Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled;
And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair,
Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime.
And then the rain began,--the jolly old rain!

Okay. We didn't have to post bombers and place Lewis guns, and we weren't in immediate danger of being shot or blown to pieces. But it was a grim sight we awoke to on that morning.
Abandoned tents, clothes, and remnants of food and litter of every description were scattered everywhere.
My brother said, "Come on. We have to get moving."
I said, "What am I going to wear?" as we had, we thought sensibly, taken all our possessions back to the the car the night before, not having forseen that we would get absolutely soaked by torrential rain.
"You'll just have to wear those." he said, and I literally started to cry as I pulled on a pair of trousers that looked like they had just been dipped in a river.
We packed up the tent and sleeping bags and began to trudge off through the Somme-like mud.
Then I was "Oh! Look. Someone's left some tins of beer behind."
I went to salvage them, and my brother said, "Come on. We don't have time for that."
I thought, is this really my brother? Maybe he was adopted or dropped on his head as a young child. This is free beer we're talking about here. We ALWAYS have time for that. So I grabbed a few cans and we made our way back to the car.
Endless praise must be heaped on my brother, as I slept through most of the journey and he drove us safely home.
After sorting out the tent and other equipment, I was never so glad in my life to see a bed.

I do have to say I enjoyed it immensely. But NEVER AGAIN!

We're getting too old for that.