09:57

Glastonbury

During the Galastonbury festival there is a two-mile aircraft exclusion zone around the site. I flew around it a couple of times and it is an extraordinary sight – the size of a small town covering almost the whole valley floor - and the hills around as locals have cashed in and put up tented camps for refugees from the mud and the overflowing loos.

Two days afterwards, when the exclusion zone was lifted, I flew over the site. Every field was covered in tents, most simply abandoned but others trashed and piled on top of each other. There must have been tens of thousands of them – all probably containing discarded sleeping bags and other detritus of camping. Then there is the rubbish. Despite hundreds of huge litter-bins there is not much grass – or rather mud – that can be seen under a carpet of plastic and cardboard.

Michael Eavis, the owner of Worthy Farm, paints the whole event as some sort of eco, green and environmentally friendly affair. There is an irritating, right-on tone to it where you half expect to see Paul McCartney do one of his hippy V signs and tell you it’s all about peace and love, where horrid capitalism is parked in a corner for a long weekend.

Of course it’s not. It is a consumer pig-fest pure and simple - where middle class people take lots of drugs, listen to music made by bands that earn millions from them, leave all their rubbish where they drop it and then abandon their throw-away camping equipment when they go home.

I wish they’d just give the eco bullshit a rest.
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09:40

Paradise

Paradise
My father is very ill. We sat together a few evenings ago, holding hands and looking out onto his garden, his creation over fifty years, in ...
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18:01

Tracy Emin

Tracy Emin
I had never seen an exhibition of Tracy Emin’s work before. No one could miss a life lived so publicly, so the exhibition at the Hayward Gal...
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