Well someone had to do it and with my 'canvas is for painting on not sleeping under' outlook on life it wasn't going to be me, so I was most grateful to Linda W & Angela, the Happy Campers, for accepting the challenge and running (literally) with it. They took their assignment to camp and to cover as much of the festival as they could manage very seriously indeed, planning with military precision and timing as you might expect from the combined forces of a teacher and a PA. So they ditched their husbands, blagged a tent and we'd see them as passing blurs as they dashed up to see us and then off to another event miles away. One half of them does that orienteering marathon fell-running thing up in the Lake District and they are both Hash House Harriers too, so the uphill trek to the Walled Garden to see us was but a stroll for them that left the rest of us (well me after carrying loads of bags up every day) needing oxygen.
I have this vision of them queuing outside the shower block in their PJs and wellies which may have been the only time they stayed still, apart from sitting down here ...
...to our end of festival dovegreyreader crew cream tea, and for which Bookhound had come suitably equipped...as we drove across on Sunday morning all he kept muttering was 'hope I've remembered the clotted cream' which thankfully he had.
So here's the Happy Campers first report, expect more over the next few days including I hope their take on the the now legendary Kate Winslet performance. I heard it from outside the tent and it sounded utterly hilarious.
Friday 22nd July
Simon Garfield ‘Just My Type’ Bowling Green 2.45pm
It’s the first afternoon and Linda and I are feeling understandably smug after getting the (previously unseen) borrowed tent up without a hitch - just missing a deluge of biblical proportions.
Much anticipation – Simon Garfield is The Font Guru and before you could say Helvetica there he was on stage asking us to admit to the grate crime (as Molesworth would say) of misusing Comic Sans. Poor Linda had to raise her hand at this point but I’ve always been an Ariel girl, so avoided ritual humiliation for the moment. On his T Shirt were the teasing letters
ex
ugs
veti
ld
cunningly sandwiched between the two sides of his cardigan. The talk, he said, had a dogs theme and we were then thrilled by salacious stories of that old reprobate Eric Gill’s sexual experimentation with anything that moved (not excepting man’s best friend). Never mind the quick brown fox, in this case it was more like ‘the bearded typographer jumps on to the helpless dog’. Naturally the pangram most favoured by Dovegreyreader is ‘’zany eskimo craves fixed job with quilting party’………I hope to see Simon in her tent next year being presented with a suitable knitsuke. Actually, she was terrified of Mr Garfield casting his expert eye over the Dovegreyreader bunting, as its homely letters were cut out by loyal Bookhound at the kitchen table. But as TFG says, type is all about emotion, nuance, and finding the right thing for you. So yours is perfect, Dovegrey.
By the end of this thoroughly diverting romp through his best selling book – make sure you don’t pick up the one about hot sex at the beach and kinky online shopping – we had worked out the advert on the T shirt:
Vexed
Pugs
Veterinary
Holdings Ltd
that well known company, run by very clever…..dogs.
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