Glastonbury Festival on a sunny day

I have eaten well at festivals over the years; Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s mackerel burgers at Port Eliot and Leon’s veggie platters at the Big Chill were real treats. And I have eaten poorly, sampling under-salted vegetarian gloop from every corner of the globe.
So here we are packing and prepping for festivals. I plan for three days’ worth of dinners. Festival breakfast is a more chaotic affair than a normal camp breakfast due to the large amounts of ale downed the night before; we pack plenty of chocolate croissants so that the children can help themselves while I attempt to rouse Math with a cattle prod.

Day 1: Family festival pie
When Math compered a day at the Free University of Glastonbury, he had to interview the writer, campaigner and comedian Mark Thomas. During the conversation, Math admitted that his family had been – for two days – dining off an enormous Glastonbury pie. “I really hope that is true,” said Mark Thomas. It was.

For festival pie to be the perfect one dish meal, it needs protein and a portion of vegetables to go along with the carbohydrate pastry case. Hot water crust pastry is my favourite type of pastry as it is so easy to make and can be rolled out pretty thinly, because I am not keen on a pastry-heavy pie.
Recipes
Beef pie with slow-cooked onions and greens recipe
Sausage rolls recipe

Day 2: Quesadillas

Quesadillas don’t leave much washing up, which you should always be mindful of at festivals where there is only ever a stand pipe. Many festival goers break out the bacon and eggs but it’s not easy or pleasant to wash up after such a greasy meal.
The quesadillas should be spicy with grated cheese, but other than that, choose your favourite fillings. This is how I like mine, with spiced black beans (made at home), grated cheese, olives, avocado, spicy tomato salsa (shop bought or made at home) and if you can store it, Greek yogurt or soured cream.
Warm up a frying pan on the stove. On a tortilla, spread some black beans then add olives, spicy tomato sauce, avocado, a squeeze of lime, yogurt or cream and a handful of grated cheese. Roll the tortilla up and warm it in the dry pan for a couple of minutes, turn it over and cook again on the other side.
Recipes
Quesadillas
Pasta pesto
Super quick and something I know will fill the children up, and it won’t spoil when the ice packs lose their cooling power.

Day 3: Stew from tins
It’s day three at the festival. Let’s open some tins. If you make the spice mix at home this is a simple recipe to make even at a festival and will probably save you £6 a head.
Recipe
Moroccan chickpea stew, serves two

The talk will range from obscure camping cults to the best way to make pancakes over a campfire. There will be diversions on camping etiquette and the role of camping in alternative culture. We will address what to do in case of rain, sex, or loss of faith.

Illustration by Paul Blow

I will be compering and reading at The Free University of Glastonbury in The Park area of the festival, and extolling why we must camp at Port Eliot and Camp Bestival. In August, I am doing a joint event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival with Tom Hodgkinson (How To Be Idle and the forthcoming Brave Old World: A Practical Guide to Husbandry, or the Fine Art of Looking After Yourself). I will add events as and when they are confirmed to the feed below. And if any festival organisers or literary campsite owners want to bring my rolling camping talk to their event or site, you can contact me via the comments section of any post, the About page at the bottom of this page or twitter on @MDeAbaitua.

I have camped at Glastonbury for two consecutive years with my three children and will do so again this year. I have some insights to share with other Dads who might consider attempting the festival with their children:

1) Camp high
As a performer, I camped backstage at the Park, on a high pitch overlooking the festival, close to the fence. The effort involved in hauling the gear uphill was offset by the relative peace and quiet of the spot throughout the festival. If I was going there as a common-or-garden Dad punter, I would aim far away and high.

2) Take a wheelbarrow or trolley
Hauling your gear from car to site is a difficult and unpleasant experience if you’ve got a big family tent and all the extra beds and sleeping bags that come with children. Glastonbury has metal reinforced pathways that are wide and hard enough to take a large trolley or barrow. The walk from car to campsite for me was about half an hour. I had to make two trips. I would struggle to carry my tent more than ten minutes on my back. Keep a tight rein on the amount of gear you are taking. Take some rope to secure your gear to the barrow and some string to tie all the sleeping bags and mats together.

3) Cooking
I never used to cook at festivals but these days finances mean we have to bring all our food with us. So what to take? We live off a big home-cooked chicken pie and sausage rolls, large jars of homemade pesto with bags of pasta, and a bag of croissants. You can’t wash up easily at Glastonbury, and you don’t want to lug a coolbox there, so I avoid meat and food that requires anything more complex than heating a pan of water. Don’t stop off at Tescos on your way there, as then you will have to carry thin shopping bags across the festival.

4) Kids’ field
Bugaboo hell. None of the parents we travelled with enjoyed the kids’ field. First of all, who wants to sit around watching their children do stuff? Secondly, children aren’t going to learn to juggle in the hour or two you spend there. I’d rather see family experiences more integrated with the festival such as…

5) House of Fairy Tales
Established by artists Deborah Curtis and Gavin Turk, the House of Fairy Tales is “a child-centred artist led project which draws on an extensive team of artists, performers, writers, educationalists, designers, musicians, film makers, dreamers and philosophers to create magical, parallel worlds where learning is play and play is directed learning.” The people at the House of Fairy Tales are one highlight of Glastonbury and my three children get thoroughly involved. Last year Doctor Who himself, Matt Smith, dropped by and was photographed with all the kids.The House of Fairy Tales is located in the Park area.

6) The Park
Established by Emily Eavis in 2007, the Park is ideal for Dads. The bar is not so packed, the stage is full of interesting and alternative acts (all the bands I want to see – in Glastonbury 2011, that’s James Blake, Tame Impala, John Grant), and you are well out of the maddening throng. Also the Free University of Glastonbury is in the Park area – I am talking about the history and meaning of camping there on Sunday at 1pm.

7) But what about the headliners?
I didn’t see any of the big acts. I’ve been in those crowds without kids. I couldn’t face them with small children. One of the consequences of taking kids with you is that you are excused Must Seeing the Must See events. I wouldn’t cross the road to watch Bono sing, never mind jostle for position amongst thousands of other people. Free yourself of festival fret – that feeling that something better is happening somewhere else and you must trudge off to see it.

You sound like a really dull man
I am speaking only from the Dad perspective here, from that portion within me concerned with the logistics of shifting a family around. But it’s a fair comment.

9) When should Dads arrive at Glastonbury, and when should they leave?
Judging arrival and departure is the real trick. Over the last few years, because of the recession and the poor rate of exchange with the euro, many people take Glastonbury as their holiday. This skews the usual traffic patterns, with lots of people arriving on a Wednesday. I aim to arrive around 11am on Thursday morning. and have never any problems and barely any delay. We leave on Sunday about 4-5pm and likewise there is no queue. To put that in perspective, my mate spent six hours in the car park on Monday. Six hours! Fortunately he did not have his children with him

10) Buggy?
We went for two backpacks in which to haul the children around, each packed up with wet and hot weather gear. Just don’t take a buggy that runs on casters, as I saw a lot of Dads digging the mud and grass out from the wheels. My reasoning is that a buggy will struggle in the really deep Glasto mud. The last two years have been dry. But it won’t always be so.

The Big Chill lacks drama. As the name suggests, it has no narrative arc.

The layout of the Glastonbury camp is a narrative arc. If the festival-goer travels that arc, they will fashion their own individual myth. Miss out on one of these plot points, one of these locations in the camp, and they will not have a Glastonbury story.

The myth of the festival follows the hero’s journey as set down by Joseph Campbell in his study of comparative mythology, the Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Campbell’s ur-plot was famously used by George Lucas for Star Wars and has since acted as scaffold for a thousand Hollywood blockbusters. Likewise, each stage of the hero’s journey as identified by Campbell is inscribed in the Glastonbury campsite and accompanying rituals.

How so, exactly?

The hero’s journey must pass from the known land into the unknown. It begins with the call to adventure. In Star Wars, this is the moment Luke Skywalker, an ordinary farm boy, receives a holographic message from Princess Leia via R2D2. In Glastonbury, the call to adventure comes when the humble farm boy or social media consultant receives their ticket.

Once the call to adventure is accepted, then the hero grasps the supernatural aid. A lightsaber for Luke Skywalker, Excalibur for King Arthur, the lyre for Orpheus’ descent into the underworld. I may sound like Super Hans from Peep Show when I say this, but it cannot be avoided: in the Glastonbury myth that supernatural aid is drugs.

It is worth taking a brief detour to discuss what drugs are for.

Drugs are bound up with rites of passage. In some traditional cultures, psychoactives such as ibogaine or yage are employed in a ritual that turns a boy into a man. In the modern Western civilisation, intoxication is a rite of passage, the first drink, the first cigarette, the first spliff.

The wide array of drugs provide an assault course which individual psyches must conquer and emerge battered and repentant at the other end. Drugs catalyse the most basic narrative of rise and fall, up and down. Because I do not take drugs, I do not have Glastonbury stories, and the failure to fully mount the myth is why my account of the festival is so boring.

The next stage in the hero’s journey is the threshold and the mentor. In Star Wars, the mentor is obviously Obi-Wan Kenobi, and it is Obi-Wan who introduces Luke to the ways of the Force. The Force and the galaxy beyond Tatooine are the unknown through which Luke must journey. The threshold is the cantina of Mos Eisley, a borderland or liminal space populated by weird and wonderful creatures. He requires the help of his mentor to survive these creatures and to enter the unknown of outer space.

(By the way, the sooner someone recreates Mos Eisley cantina in Glastonbury, the better).

At Glastonbury, the musicians are the mentors. Their performances are judged on how successfully they fulfil the role as mentor in the arc. That is why a successful Glastonbury performance is unique to the camp, because it has to play its role in the yearning for personal myth. The stars and the music are invested with the wisdom of the unknown. They instruct the crowd in the ways of the Force: or, in the case of rock music, a collection of romantic myths concerning derangement of the senses, sexual exploration, and mass catharsis through loss of self.

The faces of the Glastonbury crowd as they seek rapture in the moment, suspending rationality, coasting on pure emotion, is the face of Luke Skywalker as he feels the Force.

The music takes the Glastonbury hero across the threshold.
Then they must faces the challenges and temptations of the unknown.
Otherwise known as Bez’s Acid House.
Or Club Dada. Or Trash City. Or the Rabbit Hole.

The Glastonbury hero will set off into these challenges with friends but temptations will ensure he or she loses everyone along the way. After all, Luke Skywalker loses Han Solo to the temptation of paying off Jabba the Hut. Luke’s fellow pilots are picked off one by one, and he must face the “big bad”. Alone, Luke Skywalker skims the valley of the Death Star, pursued by Darth Vadar, trying to pop a bomb in a ventilation shaft.

I don’t know what Glastonbury experience corresponds to this encounter. The narrative pattern of myth requires an abyss. We all have our abyss. Our four-in-the-morning hollowing out. These after-dark areas of Glastonbury exist so that you can experience the abyss. If you do not face the abyss, you will not have a Glastonbury story.

After this encounter, the hero heads out for transformation and atonement. This is the area of Glastonbury known as the Green Fields, and it is here that all Glastonbury stories should end. Dawn rising, the hero weary but changed by their adventure, bringing back some scrap of knowledge for civilisation, even if that knowledge is just a story about a really weird night.

So when people talk about the unique atmosphere of Glastonbury, or a Glastonbury spirit that makes it different from all other festivals, what I believe they are actually identifying is the mythological potential of the campsite, through which they can realise through their own hero’s journey.

Matthew De Abaitua is performing at the Free University of Glastonbury in the Park area on Sunday at 1pm. He will talk about his new book The Art of Camping and he might speak of this matter, or not; it’s possible that he will never mention this again.

Quesadillas don’t leave much washing up, which you should always be mindful of at festivals where there is only ever a stand pipe. Many festival goers break out the bacon and eggs but it’s not easy or pleasant to wash up after such a greasy meal.
The quesadillas should be spicy with grated cheese, but other than that, choose your favourite fillings. This is how I like mine, with spiced black beans (made at home), grated cheese, olives, avocado, spicy tomato salsa (shop bought or made at home) and if you can store it, Greek yogurt or soured cream.
Warm up a frying pan on the stove. On a tortilla, spread some black beans then add olives, spicy tomato sauce, avocado, a squeeze of lime, yogurt or cream and a handful of grated cheese. Roll the tortilla up and warm it in the dry pan for a couple of minutes, turn it over and cook again on the other side.

Black beans

Ingredients

1 onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 handful raisins
1 tbs cocoa powder
Salt and black pepper
1 chilli, chopped
1/2 bunch coriander, chopped
Juice of a lime
Oil for frying
1 tsp cumin, ground
1 tsp coriander seeds, ground
1 star anise
1 tsp caraway seeds, ground
1 tsp ground cinnamon

Method

Gently cook the onions, garlic and chilli in some oil. Add the spices, beans, cocoa and raisins, a little water and cook until the beans are soft. Remove the star anise and make a paste by mashing the mixture. Add salt and pepper, lime and coriander leaves. This will keep for a few days in an airtight container until you are ready to use it in your quesadillas.

Spicy tomato salsa

Ingredients

6 ripe tomatoes, roughly chopped
1 bunch spring onions, finely sliced
A handful coriander leaves, chopped
1 tbs cider vinegar
2 tsp sugar
Salt

Method

Mix all the ingredients together and keep in a sterilised jar for a few days to use in your quesadillas.

Ingredients

1 portion of rough puff pastry
1 packet of veggie sausages
1 packet of organic bangers or 250g sausage meat
1 beaten egg
Tomato ketchup

Method

On a floured surface, roll out half the pastry into one long strip about 15cm in depth.
Spread a layer of ketchup down the middle and lay a veggie sausages or meat sausage on top.
Brush the nearside edge of the pastry with egg wash and fold over.
Pinch the edge with a fork, cut into large or small rolls.
Cut two little slits into each roll, brush with egg wash and cook in a hot oven (200oC) for 15 to 20 minutes.

Hot water crust pastry

80g butter, cubed
100ml water
1 egg, beaten
225g plain flour
A pinch of salt
Pie filling
500g minced beef
2 eggs, beaten
3 onions, finely sliced
1/2 pointed cabbage, finely sliced
1 handful of breadcrumbs
1 handful coriander leaves chopped
Knob of butter
Vegetable oil

Marinade

1 star anise
2 cloves garlic, crushed
2 lumps of stem ginger in syrup, finely chopped
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 tsp brown rice vinegar
2 tsp soy sauce

Method

To make the pastry

Melt the butter in the water in a small pan. Put the flour and salt in a large bowl, make a well in the middle and drop in the egg. Once the butter is melted, add to the flour and egg and briskly mix with a wooden spoon. Once it has come together, spread it out on a dinner plate and leave to cool. Then roll it into a ball, cover with cling film and refrigerate for half an hour or so while you make the pie filling.

To make the pie filling

Heat the oven to 200oC.
Mix together the minced beef in the marinade ingredients.
Cook the onions in a few tablespoons of oil on a medium heat until they are soft and browning, this should take longer than you expect.
Drain them in a sieve and sprinkle with salt.
Saute the greens in butter for a couple of minutes.
Split your pastry in two and roll out a piece to line your pie dish, I use a loose bottomed tart tin, as this is quite a shallow pie.
Add 3/4 of the egg, breadcrumbs and coriander to the beef mixture.
Layer the pie filling, first with the cabbage, then the beef and top with onions.
Top your pie with the other half of the rolled out pastry, pinch it all the way around, cut in two air holes and glaze with the rest of the beaten egg.
Decorate the pie with a pastry shapes before you glaze it.
Cook in the hot oven for about 20 minutes.
A metal skewer should come out very hot from the middle of the pie when it is done.

Luke had foraged wooden stakes for fuel; they were laid flat upon the long, dry grass, their tips aflame in the fire pit. As the stakes burned, he got up and adjusted their length. It was not the safest of arrangements; the edges of the pit smouldered as the fire spread along the stake, and visitors tripped over them in the dark. But he seemed to know what he was doing. For the weekend, he was the keeper of the flame.

The conversation turned to meat. Rupert had been to St John’s Market in Liverpool and watched a man auction off bags of assorted meats. Five quid a bag. Ten quid for a bigger bag. No indication of the contents. Just meats, a variety thereof. Cath remembered the tripe and tongue stall at St John’s. Then Luke mentioned the grill steaks advert that made a grand claim of their “pocket of juice”. Other processed burgers lacked this pouch of indeterminate fluid. They were dry. The design flaw of high fat content was made into a point of differentiation and that was why I was laughing, at the thought of all the meetings and money that had gone into marketing the advantage of a “pocket of juice”.

I am a big fan of the Port Eliot festival, being their very first paid customer way back when. I have been researching We Are Camping for a year now. For the event, I lead festival goers through the campsite while talking about the meaning and history of camping.