At the Festival Site

 I went up to the Festival site yesterday with the intention of seeing the free live broadcast of the Media Show in the Marquee near the entrance.  However, when I got there fifteen minutes before the start of the show, the seats were already full, so I wandered off to look at the stalls around the site instead.

This was at the Greenpeace stall.  The turtle is made of old tires!  Apparently, old tires are sent to the Gambia, where they burn them to get at the metals embedded within the rubber, so rather than burn the tires, they are being encouraged to make them into artworks like this, or practical things like the tire armchair that was also on the stall.

Just a few stalls along was Plantlife.  They run wildlife reserves across the country with an emphasis on rare species.  As the chap at the stall said, people usually haven't heard of them - but they have heard of NoMowMay, which is their campaign.

I had a look at the Oxfam bookshop, briefly.  I used to be able to take away carrier bags full of books, but they have raised their prices rather too much for me to be able to do that now.

There was another second hand bookshop on site, run by the National Trust, which had an interesting selection, including some quite rare books (I noticed a book on ciphers that they wanted £70 for!).

A choir was singing outside the Festival Bookshop, from Hereford College of Arts.  I found an interesting book there by Juno Dawson (I recognised the name because she's written for Doctor Who) called Gender Games.  She's in a panel talking about witches at the Festival.

I had a chat with one of the stewards, too.  He's been stewarding at the Festival for years, and when I wandered on, he went to stand at the back of the talk he was stewarding.  When I saw him later, he said the talk had been very good, but the speaker hadn't made any concessions to the youth of his audience - it being Schools Day for secondary schools. 

I went back to the Marquee and listened to the discussion for a while from the edge of the tent - the sides were open, but by then my back was starting to ache, so I didn't stay long.