14 December 2010

Meredith

I worked at the Meredith festival over the weekend, in Raph's Beatbox.

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We arrived the day before it started and got a sweet camp spot. Me and Fryman put up Raph's hilarious 'baby boomer' tent, also known as the 'Taj Mahal'.

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Business was brisk at the Beatbox all weekend. We made and sold a lot of good food and also had a lot of laughs.

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By the end of it all, we only had fries left. People kept buying 'em.

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A lot of the time, I was cutting up tomatoes, washing lettuce and 'pounding cow' (making patties from big bags of mince-meat, which I always seemed to be carrying when I saw the Hari Krishnas from the tent next door). I also made the coffee to keep up staff morale.

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Working with customers is fun and sometimes nerve-racking. I was tongue-tied for the first half hour and kept saying words like 'mate' and 'hi' at the wrong point in the conversation. But after a while, I slipped into it and started enjoying myself - it's a bit like performing on a stage, I imagine.

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The campsite had expanded exponentially, a mass of guy ropes, cooler bags and driza-bones.

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One night we couldn't find the tents, because Raph's Taj Mahal had collapsed in the rain.

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When I wasn't working, I mostly lay in the tent eating fruit and biscuits, reading Steve Martin's autobiography 'Born Standing Up'.

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I also listened in on people's conversations as they sat around being hungover or drinking.

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A happy coincidence, I ran into Milly and her friends one night and hit the Pink Flamingo bar for a couple of cocktails. Ed and I returned there the next night to a very different scene, which he likened to a place set up immediately following a natural disaster.

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Raph let me escape the box to watch Neil Finn play as the sun went down on Saturday night. It was really beautiful! I was frustrated with the people standing near me who carried on talking and making boring jokes, but they paid for their tickets and I didn't and they're probably really nice people.

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It got pretty muddy at some stages, but it didn't bother me or anyone else that much.

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The man of the match was unquestionably Fryman. Raph and him have a special relationship, illustrated well in this shot taken on Sunday while packing up.

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We stopped for our traditional meal at the pub in Meredith, where it became apparent we were all a bit knackered.

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