Glade 2007

Oxfam’s been successfully providing a stewarding operation at the Glade for the past three years, so you would think that by now we would know what to expect.  14,500 hedonistic, loved-up partygoers, gallons of luminescent face paint, the best sound rigs that money can hire and some of the best Electronic music acts around on the scene today.  

Oh no, nothing could have prepared us for what’s already been described as a biblical festival by its organisers.

How do you plan for the entire site been effectively turned into an island for a few hours on Saturday due to all the A and B roads that surrounded it, being under two to four feet of water?  How do you plan for festivalgoers queuing to get on site stood in anything up to four feet of water at some entrances? Where does it say in the Oxfam Coordinators hand book that the small stream running down the side of our camp site may turn into a small river that breached its banks and gave some of you a very cold and wet wake up call?

The answer to these questions and many others are:  You can’t.  Its impossible to plan for weather conditions that haven’t been experienced locally for over 30 years, but that didn’t stop our stewarding operation and it certainly didn’t stop the Glade partygoers.

To see stewards who had been lucky enough not to have had their tent and belongings flooded out, offering spare tent space to stewards who had been washed out was great. But to see those same stewards offering their spare dry clothes to fellow stewards in the same circumstances was heart-warming to say the least.

Thankfully, come Sunday the sun managed to find its place in the sky, and watching a few thousand partygoers stomping the day away to some top tunes in their Wellington boots of all things is a memory that I’m never going to forget.

Me, Paddy and Oxfam would like to offer our sincere and very very personal thanks to all of you that helped raise £30,000 for Oxfam’s work to alleviate poverty and suffering around the world, and under some of the worse festival conditions that we’ve ever experienced so,

Respect, Love and our very personal thanks.

John and Paddy

P.S. We want all of you back next year, so please get your applications in early.