Thursday 7th September, West Princes St:
Before getting inside the front door of my house in the morning a white van crunched up on the kerb. The side door opened and Darren's head poked out, like Gnasher from the Beano with his forehead shaved, peering out of the door and smilingly telling me he had 'treats' and that he 'knew a secret' and he'd tell me it if I got in the van. As I approached and got inside I felt a sharp sting in the upper leg area and then the rest is a blank

I woke up in a Southampton Travelodge and was told that I'd been injected with "whale tranquilizers" and that "the fresh air would do me good". No explanation was given further than that. Shortly after I fell again into a deep drug-induced snooze.

Awoken in the morning with nose salts a ferry was taken to the Isle of Wight. We headed on to Bestival. I'd given up on reasoning with these foamy-mouthed lunatics and decided to capitulate and follow them on their tour.

Arriving at Bestival I was then advised, upon seeing a henna tattoo stall, that I should get WORLD PEACE tattooed on my forehead because it would be "futile". I agreed but there wasn't time to do it before Shitdisco went on so the idea was temporarily dropped, though we did get a reasonable quote of £8 for a whole forehead's worth of profound message, and also that it'd last ten to fourteen days: bargain. My mind was now pregnant with a joke: I had it in mind to travel home with it still on my forehead and try to convince my girlfriend that I'd gotten it done for real whilst I was on pills. "Look, see, it’s not coming off," I'd say, as she scrubbed at my face with the flannel really hard. "I know that it's idiotic, but we'll just have to accept that it's there now, eh?" I'd continue.

I decided that I'd come back later as these possibilities splashed around inside my skull. I proceeded to the Rock & Roll tent to aid setting up and also to watch the gig. Backstage I quaffed ten cans of Red Bull in an hour and I was shaking. The gig was excellent etc. I tried to take a few photos but I was shaking too much so I handed out some glowsticks and went to find some hallucinogens.

Next I began to look for a place I would later be able to sleep. This, in retrospect, should have been sorted out earlier on, alas though there was nothing I could do about it now.
Thankfully Glover, the sound man, informed me that I could stay in the tent that his brother would be bringing, for this I felt grateful, though I would need to help put the bastard up. We set up camp on the hard moon-rock ground, dusty and horrible, above the festival, where the pegs of the tents were almost impossible to smash into the soil. Five minutes in I was tripping my head off; whole encyclopaedic books of absurdist logic slashing through my mind, and it was getting dark, so putting the tent up proved to be a difficult chore. This nice man I didn't know passed me a bottle of poppers and it looked ten feet tall. I thanked him. After an hour of construction we'd managed to get most of the waterproof outer layer erect and we decided that we were just going to leave it like that. It would be adequate.

The next hour or so is a complete blur. I remember an irreversible confusion taking over me, so that I wasn't really grasping reality at all anymore, and later found myself in the big top tent listening to the Klaxons and trying to stay away from this guy who only had one working ear, the other had been chewed off, like the shape of a bite out of a sandwich in a cartoon. Darren suggested that I go get the henna tattoo done, but I couldn't really understand what he was on about. Later, feeling a little ill and tired from having been up for two or three days (I forget), I felt like going to bed.

I made my way up the steep hill to try and get back too camp, quietly wondering whether I'd shat myself, but too polite and modest and confused to bother checking. Where this idea had come from I don't know, but it was there, somehow, and it was not choosing to leave. Had I shat myself? Surely it had not come to this...time would tell. Finding the tent proved to be massively difficult. I wandered around the VIP camp for a while, jabbering wild nonsense and staring glassy-eyed at tents and faces that could possibly lead me to where I needed to go.

Somehow I climbed underneath one of the tents to the inside and was relieved to find that it belonged to us, I was safe at last, so I wrapped myself in the groundsheet that lay uselessly on the floor, put my head on my bag and tried to go to sleep staring into the dilated huge moon above, viewable through the mesh at the top of the tent. My safe feeling was shattered as a silhouette appeared against the side of the tent and began pissing. The jet was powerful and would have gone right on my face if the tent material had not been there to stop its trajectory. About a minute later the man's bladder was empty and he disappeared snorting into the darkness from whence he'd come.

Above: Joe and soundman Glover

Sometime later Glover came back and was mortified at the way we'd erected our living conditions, for most of the rest of the night, and through morning, he rocked back and forth in the corner of the tent in the foetal position whispering 'I feel like an insect' over and over again softly to seemingly no one but himself. As the wind picked up through the early morning it was difficult to open your mouth or eyes without having them filled with thick orange dust.

In the morning we got on the ferry again and travelled on to London. On the way there I received a call from my flatmate on West Princes St. He informed me that Mr. Khan had come around and begun ranting about the caravan again: "I dismantle if it is not moved, I smash." This made Darren's face crease a tad with worry. We discussed how this threat would be squirmed out of since the sentimentality gambit was straining, the ruse whereby Khan thought I’d gotten it through inheritance from a deceased loved one. We decided that camouflage would be the only answer. That, or burn it.

- TOLSON