Greenbelt again

I ned to work better at good titles for blogs. One of the reasons I never became a journalist was because I'm rubbish at headlines.

Greenbelt was great. I'm now expecting the post-Greenbelt depression, where I feel sad for a few days not to be at Greenbelt, miss all my friends and wander round looking a bit sad and not really knowing what to do with myself. I'd like to mention again what a good husband Matt is as he takes all this very well and seems to understand that just because I didn't want to leave and hardly spoke to him for a week, this doesn't mean that I'm not glad to be back with him.

What I love about Greenbelt is that I seem mainly to be friends with people who are quite likely to go to Greenbelt, whether as a steward or as a punter. So I spend most of the week wandering round bumping into people I know. This makes me feel quite popular.

I'm part of the support stewarding team. This means we work from 7pm (earlier if necessary) to 3am (usually later) wandering round an area of the site looking out for potential problems and helping out where necessary, also being friendly, chatting to Greenbelters and telling people where the nearest toilets are, where venues are and where to find lost porperty.

This year we've looked for a lot of lost children, tried to make sure people are only on site if they should be and asked people not to drink except in the organic beer tent or the Winged Ox pub. I also tried my hand at directing traffic up on the helicopter field (the far campsite, where helicopters land when the racecourse is a racecourse rather than a campsite) which was not entirely successful. I thought I'd found a dead body, but fortunately it was just a tired Greenbelter.

The best thing about support is the team atmosphere. I love my team. They're ace! Stewarding is great fun and a good way to see the festival. It's a way to make Greenbelt better and to help people to enjoy it more. My personal recommendation for anyone who wants to try it out is to go to venues stewarding as you get to help manage queues, but site stewards also seem to like what they do. Backstage means you get to wear earplugs and stop people crowd-surfing and nights stay up til 8 am keeping everything safe. They also finish with breakfast together. Support is interesting cos we get to do a bit of everything, but it's good to have got some experience of stewarding first.

My sister came and camped with my friends from Sanctus and seemed to have a good time. I saw them a few times - when we were stewarding near where they were camped we would go over and say hi. I saw the Reduced Shakespeare Company and also Milton Jones - both very funny. Also drank a lot of coffee and sat in the sun - I think I've come back quite brown.

Back to real life and work tomorrow... I'm starting to think about organising the stewarding for Soundcheck in February - this is SPEAK's annual gathering. It's 24-27 Feb 2006 in London - if you'd like to help steward let me know.