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Friday 5 December 2008

Uncool fun

Charles Spencer goes to Guilfest

My body aches, my bones creak and I have a nagging headache that paracetamol won’t shift. It’s a bit like having a hangover again, but mercifully without the attendant guilt.

As I write, my son Ed, his friend Ollie and I have just spent the weekend at Guilfest, accurately and succinctly billed in the Daily Telegraph’s bumper festival preview a few weeks ago as ‘An unlikely success. Not bothered with cool, thus unpretentious fun.’

What I like best about this festival, held each year in Stoke Park on the outskirts of prosperous Guildford, is that it’s just 20 minutes down the A3 from our house and has plenty of parking. This means that I don’t have to sleep under canvas and can come back home each night to the comforts of my own bed and bathroom. At 53 these things begin to matter.

There were lots of people in their fifties at Guilfest, quite a few in their sixties, and one or two who looked as if they were in their seventies and even eighties. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Rock and roll music has been around for more than half a century now and it is a hard habit to kick. The presence of so many oldies, however, did mean that the gently sloping field that declines towards the main stage was liberally dotted with those handy fold-out canvas armchairs complete with personal drinks-holder that have become such a part of the great British outdoors in recent years, and which are so much more comfortable than the old-fashioned deckchair.

Even I felt these weren’t quite the thing for a rock festival, and thus spent my time either sitting on the grass or else standing up and jiggling about in a faintly embarrassed way when the proceedings got livelier, hence today’s aches and pains.

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