Not me, but a mate
Well, a mate of a mate. One of the rainy Glastonburys of the late 1990s - someone who had been travelling in the same car as me had spotted some of his mates camping in the same field as us and went off to join them and put his tent up there. The rest of us set up camp about 200 yards away and then endured one of the worst rainstorms ever. We basically spent the whole evening trudging around in ever deepening mud before retiring to our tents to listen to the rain.

The next morning, we see a forlorn figure walking towards us, picking his way through the tents. It's the guy who abandoned us the day before - he's got his arm in a sling and as he got closer I could see that his eyebrows and quite a bit of his hair had been burnt away. Once I stopped laughing, I asked him what the bloody hell he'd done. It turns out that he'd got hungry in the evening and tried to cook on his gas stove, and because it was raining, he took the stove inside his tent. Although you wouldn't need to be Sherlock Holmes to work out what the net result of this was going to be, this genius didn't seem to realise the utter idiocy of what he was doing.

It wasn't just his tent that burnt down, but several around it as well (thank fuck he didn't camp next to us) and most of the stuff he'd taken with him had turned to ashes too. All he was left with was a half-melted stereo, which despite all the fire and rain still worked. There were also a lot of people who were very pissed off with this guy and he really, really wanted to go home. Fortunately for him the rest of us were feeling the same way as we'd endured a wet Glastonbury the year before and as we hadn't got tickets - we'd paid about a fiver to some dodgy gypsy for one of the re-entry handstamp things - no one was really that bothered about sticking around for the whole weekend.

We got back to the car to find that the battery was flat because some plonker had left the headlights on, but fortunately a friendly AA man was around to give us a jump. We managed to find about £2 between us so at least he had the price of a pint for helping us out. All I remember of the journey home was the the odd smell of the charred person.

I haven't seen this guy since, because, to be quite honest, I don't trust him. His stupidy terrifies me. If you're reading this, sorry mate, but some lessons you have to learn the hard way.

Apologies for the length of this post...
(JamScones, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 11:35, Reply)