DOUBLE SPREAD

The Guardian has my piece on the BIG CHILL as a double spread in the travel section. The Guardian also has a video on line.

DONE THAT

remnants of open air stage

My take on the Big Chill is in this Saturday's Guardian. I am dyslexic and write slowly. Hence I have not worked on this diary while writing the Guardian copy. I am about to drive to Gloucester to collect a young Australian law student who is visiting her grandmother here in Colwall. This done, I will get to work bringing both my Blog and this BIGCHILLDIARY up to date. Meanwhile here is a pic taken yesterday - good-bye Open Air stage...

THAT WAS THE BIG CHILL

All over bar the writing - so here I sit back home and face the screen that dominates! 1500 words on Katrina Larkin's festival is due on the Guardian travel editor's desk by dawn on Thursday for this Saturday's Travel section. Please don't hate it. And there will be video on the Guardian's web site of Katrina and I. You can watch and listen to me philosophising - OK, being pretentious. I know, no need to tell me - the Resident Teenager (once he gets out of bed) will do that...

PHOTOGRAPHERS

photographing the photographer photographing me photographing her photographing me etc, etc etc

Filming from 1.30 thru till late evening - video and still photographers from the Guardian. The paper will use four stills at most - so why so many takes? Because I'll submit the piece on Wednesday morning and the editor needs all possibilities covered.

LAZYBONES

both main stages near completion

In truth, I was exhausted last night - hence not putting the pics on the BLOG. I finished working on a long piece for the Guardian at 2 in the morning and was back at my desk four hours later. Plus going to Eastnor and shopping for the BIG CHILL weekend. All four of my sons will be here plus wives, children, girlfriends. Better cook ahead and freeze. I am sneaking a microwave into the house - Bernadette believes that that they leak rays - as Thurber's Aunt believed that electricity leaked out of unused wall sockets. As with Religious Faith, this isn't something over which one can argue with a believer.
And we'd invited the Shit Sahib to dinner. I cooked packets of trout fillet layered with smoked salmon and baby spinach. So, yes, shattered. Two bottles of good Rioja Alta Reserva came to my aid...

SUNSHINE IN THE MORNING

7 a.m. looking from our garden across colwall cricket field

Makes for a lovely day. I have been up since 6.30 - mostly worrying. I am yacking about my journey through the Americas at the Big Chill on Sunday at 3.30. Will anyone want to listen? If so, will some of them want signed copies of Old Man On A Bike? How many copies should I order from HarperCollins?
And how do I ban the Resident Teenager and his fearsome friends?

FOUR STAR

four star general with her executive aide

A real General would have a staff of fifty ready to salute - plus a couple of warrant officers and a couple of clerks to do the brain work...So why is Caroline so calm? Confidence in her ability gained through experience? Probably...or is she calm by nature?

DAY THREE

The drizzle has finally stopped. I watch awhile. The Deer Park should be chaos. Trucks and machinery and Landrovers seem to strew a trail of workmen in yellow slickers. Yet there is order to all this. The Festival Manager, Caroline, must be some sort of genius. Were she in the Military, she would be a four star General - in the US Army. The British Military are suspicious of women...

DRUG-FUELED ORGIES ON SKATEBOARDS

good sign

The downpour threatened by the BBC weather man has been a soft drizzle and the sky is lightning. Hurah!
I had tea yesterday in Colwall with a lady in her 80s. She referred to the Big Chill as, That dreadful thing...Her husband had intended taking the BIG CHILL to Court. Sadly (or fortunately) he died. Wind in the right direction, faint music might be heard from their garden.
Why should the pleasure of some forty thousand festival fans be such anathema?
I was dwelling on this this morning while lazing in the tub.
The Big Chill is the major event for those I think of as young here in the Ledbury area. The Malvern Hills Conservators have banned biking and mountain-boarding on the hills (though horseback riding is OK!). Earlier this summer, my teenage son and friends were swimming in the Wye. Police ordered them out of the river, searched them and ordered them to move on. More recently the same group were playing Frisbee in the Deer Park at Eastnor. Police again...The Deer Park is open to the public. Or is it only open to those under 12 and over 25? No wonder kids get mad...
The truth is that a skateboard is a sure sign of criminality. As is wearing a hoodie or wearing your pants halfway down your butt. And The Big Chill is a drug-fueled mass orgy. It ought to be stopped. What should be stopped? Everything and anything that might be fun for the young.
So writes an Old Blimp in his late 70s determined to have a ball at his first festival...

WEATHER REPORT

My wife, Bernadette, goes to the Malvern spa most evenings while I cook dinner (roast chicken tonight). All four of my sons will be here for the Big Chill. A steady drizzle began half an hour ago - not good - and heavy rain is forecast for tomorrow. Fortunately I've finished mowing the lawn and have time to up-date my web site, www.simongandolfi.com.

DAY TWO

The weather has been kind, overcast but no rain with a good breeze drying the land. Mostly it is a day of preparation. Trucks unload aluminum matting and tubing. Poles strung with electric lights spread along the deer park roads, clumps of portacabins, a lone marquee out towards the main arena...

RADIO BIG CHILL

radio big chill

The radio aerial is up...a monument (temporary) to compete with the Eastnor Obelisk the other side of the valley.

INVASION

as yet only a new fence

WEIRD - most Guardian readers and festival-goers consider themselves members of the Green lobby. Eastnor Castle Deer Park is as green as it gets. I am watching a train of heavily-laden trailer trucks ease along the upper Deer Park track. Ancient oaks tremble. Aluminum roadways invade grass paddocks. Green is disappearing faster then Haagen-Dazs double chocolate chip on a warm summer's day...

DAY ONE: RAIN + TRUCKS = MUD

mud already

0900: Dark and overcast but promises of the rain clearing later in the morning.We have had rain on and off each day for the past week. The first trucks have arrived and are parked in the wood yard opposite the main gates to the castle.

ANCIENT OAKS AND NEW

eastnor castle deer park

The BIG CHILL will occupy over 200 acres of oak shaded parkland this year: car parks, camping, marquees, food outlets, ablution blocks and God knows what. The estate forester must check every tree in the park. A falling bough could be lethal.

BIG CHILL FAN

new bridge in the deer park

Few people would pick James Hervey-Bathurst as a festival fan. He rowed at Cambridge (Trinity College), wore tweed jackets, didn't smoke dope and listened to classical music. However - and it is a big however - he is a fan of the Big Chill - fortunate, given that forty-thousand fellow fans will be camping in his deer park. A brook divides the deer park and feeds the lakes. The brook is a logistical hurdle. This year two new bridges capable of carrying loaded trucks span the brook. Bridges don't come cheap.

JAMES HERVEY-BATHURST

james hervey-bathurst in the deer park, eastnor castle

Tea time in the kitchen at Eastnor Castle. Central is a well-scrubbed square pine kitchen table that could sit sixteen. It is a homely table in a homely room. I imagine kids yakking at each other, bowls overflowing with fresh pasta, round loaves of crusty country bread. Instead we are two. We are both trilingual, James in French and German, I in French and Spanish. We have both traveled extensively in the Near East. We are comfortable with each other. A reasonable question: How does it feel to have 40,000 revelers on your land?

EASTNOR CASTLE

eastnor castle

There are proper castles and fun castles. Proper castles were built to keep people out. Long range canon put paid to them. Defenses went underground. Now bombers drop Bunker Busters from 30,000 feet. Such is progress...
Fun castles weren't designed to keep people out. They were designed to be pretty and to impress the neighbours. Eastnor was built in 1810. It is the castle of children's fantasy. Crenelated towers rise above a nest of deciduous trees and giant conifers. Splashed with late evening sunlight, magic...
However not defensive.
The massive gate house is perfectly aligned to the great entrance doors. A canon shell could pass through the gate house and across the courtyard and through the doors into the vast entrance hall. Pugin designed the hall. It has everything that a castle should, suits of armour, lances, blunderbusses, African shields, assegais. Fun but not comfortable, and impossible to heat.
The owner, James Hervey-Bathurst lives in what was the servants wing.

BEGINNINGS

Big Chill has grown central to Katrina Larkin's life since she mounted the first event with Pete Lawrence at the Union Chapel, Islington, in 1994. Two hundred people attended; this year BIG CHILL expects 40,000 - and has progressed, via the Black Mountains, Dorset and Wiltshire, to its present home in the Deer Park at Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire where the festival employs 2000 people.
Setting up the infrastructure is kin to a military operation. Water, sewage and access head the list.

KATRINA LARKIN

Katrina Larkin is the founder of the BIG CHILL. We first met a couple of months back. The Guardian Travel editor asked me to show Katrina my Herefordshire rather than the Herefordshire of the festival. Katrina stayed with us in our cottage in Colwall. She and I visited great gardens and pubs, vineyards and artisan perry makers, paddled a canoe down the Wye. We enjoyed each other's company, had a great time. The resulting article is on the Guardian's web site.