The Campbell Academy Blog (31)

Avalon Undefeated

The final episode in the extraordinary early summer of 2024 that I was able to experience was the family trip to Glastonbury (our first time ever at the festival).

If you've never been, then you might enjoy this; if you have been, you might agree or disagree, but I don't intend to spend hours of blogs telling you all about this just to give you the essence of why it was one of the most extraordinary experiences I could imagine and one that exceeded all my expectations.

We went in a campervan (actually a stinking horse lorry converted into a campervan)

We stayed in the campervan fields, which meant we walked 15 minutes to get to the pedestrian entrance. However, we were able to walk from a hilltop view down towards the site to see the extraordinary and vast extension that is Glastonbury City for five days.

I'm not sure what I expected, but it wasn't that.

What I did get, though, was the most extraordinary and wonderful memories of our time together as a family and the time I spent with Stuart and Joy, our friends and their boys.

It was an amazing weekend.

As with everything, though, perhaps worth pointing out that when I woke up on a Saturday morning in the horse section of the horse lorry (which did stink of horse piss), I turned to Alison and said, "I'm never taking my kids on holiday again".

This is the Colin Campbell version of the peak-end rule lived real.

Weekends like this are full of highs and lows, of ups and downs, of unbelievable moments of joy and insight and then terrible moments of frustration and even anger when things don't go the way you want, people don't do the things you expect them to do.

That's kind of like going on holiday with your kids all the time. It's actually kind of like having a family all the time.

But just to give you a tiny little sense of what it was like.

There are about 64 stages, 220,000 people.

For every one thing that you go to see, you're missing at least 10 that you would like to see.

Callum and I made it to the secret Kasabian gig. It's not announced, you're never told they're going to be on stage, you just know that there is a band coming on at the Woodsies at 6 p.m. on Saturday and you might like them, so it's probably worth a shot.

They had to shut that stage because it was chaos, but we got in the tent.

It was an extraordinary gig.

But for me, I guess in spite of the unbelievable experience of Coldplay with the lights or Kasabian with the secrets, we went to see Frank Turner (my musical hero, who I've written about here a lot and even put his lyrics on the wall of my practice).

We went to see him in the Avalon tent.

It probably holds about 5000 something like that (hard to tell). It was just him and his guitar on a Friday afternoon.

He played some of his classics. He played 'The Ballad of Me and My Friends', a track that he rarely ever plays now, and it is one of everybody's favourites that know him.

In the middle of that, Stuart realised the significance to me of that song being played and handed me a small tin cup full of vanilla vodka flavoured with Werther's Originals. (You have to try that; ask me for a recipe.)

They were wonderful moments.

He started to set with 'Undefeated'. It's the last song off his latest album.

The lyrics (as always) are beautiful and magnificent and speak to me. It's like he writes for me.

But the amazing thing is that the five of us saw that, and it's my thing that we left. Grace, my oldest daughter, reckons it was one of the best parts of the festival for her.

Everybody loved it, just an extraordinary experience.

Don't go if you don't like portaloos, don't go if you're worried about what the toilets will be like or smell like, don't go if you want to be super clean all the time, or make sure your hair is perfect.

That's not what Glastonbury is about, but there is a group of people there that are together.

It's wonderful, it's worth it.