I am chilled. Very chilled. Just got back from the Big Chill music festival and feeling good. The music and atmosphere was something different. The entire festival over three days in a glorious deer park in Herefordshire had some of the coolest, most innovative, toe-curling bands currently playing. Highlights for me included Sia , Fourtet, ColdCut, Mozez and in my view the best: Ralph Myerz and the Jack Herren Band. There were many, many more other bands that I listened to but can't add here. I took two days off work (fri and mon) that gave me a long weekend. Arrived at the campsite on friday, around 12:30 in the afternoon and took about an hour trying to locate our friends and find a spot. The plan was to camp close to them as some arrived the night before and managed to blag a decent spot. Could we find them? No we couldn't and humping our camping equipment and about 20 litres of water meant that we were about to collapse. We started to pitch then decided the feng shui wasn't good enough (too close to the toilets) but eventually we found a quiet spot and pitched up.

It turned out that a friend who was organising the whole thing was still stuck in stationary traffic and was there after we piched our tent, fuming for over six hours! The sun was out, clear blue skies and little wind. It was going to be a sorcher and I slapped on as much sun cream as I could. A quick change in clothes and me and my friends were off to the concert. The first night had Fourtet and Coldcut as highlights but I thoroughly enjoyed Mr Scruff and Shur-I-Kan. The food was great - lots of vegan stuff. A went for the Mexican tacos - at an eye popping 4 quid per plate. Still I was hungry and they tasted divine. Water had to be consumed regularly as dehydration and heat exhaustion were two dangers I wished to avoid.

The toilets were of the potaloo type and even the first day, the combined bowel contents of 30,000+ chillers and the heat meant that many were starting to smell. But if you got to go, you got to go. Still some of them were such a mess, with shit all over the place that all you could do was either crap from a distance or close the door. My hats off to the sanitation crews who went into the toilets each morning with a hose and truck and had to suck out all the toilet contents. I saw one beefy bald headed crew member bravely open the door of one cubicle (nicknamed the pulsating beast by some) and then flip the entire toilet up revealing the God-awful pool of shit, piss and vomit under the toilet inside the tank and then drop the hose in. What a job.

I vowed to avoid the toilet as much as possible but since this was the big chill - it had what I felt was a more responsible crowd so I had to pee somewhere. Luckily the guys had a second option: piss trucks, these were mobile standup urinals and boy were they good! I felt sorry for the women who had to go into the cubicles.

Anyway, enough about toilets - the next couple of days at the festival was brilliant. Music started at 12pm and went on until 5am though I usually went to bed around 2am, shattered but also still buzzing. There were some nice things about the place: kids were welcome and there were plenty of parents there with their babies and prams, it was relatively clean as most of the chillers were quite responsible and cleaned up after themselves. Still, there were room for improvement I think.

The ice cold beer at the bars were a blessing around 2-4pm when the heat of the sun was slowly draining away but the chillers were anything but. What a festival, what a crowd - will come back next year. I have three days to prepare for my long awaited trip to the US. Also discovered I have bad sun burn on my shins.....