Turn Left At The Womble: Turn Left at the Womble- Excerpt no 8-The Hill of Death

Turn Left at the Womble- Excerpt no 8-The Hill of Death

(Extracted from my 1st book about Glastonbury, "Turn Left at the Womble." Luckily I didn't have to do the Hill of Death this year at Glasto. I was dreading the very thought of it. However, here's what I thought of it in 2010. My sympathies for anyone who endured it this year).

Once through the gate I thought it would be a quick hop back to the car as I wasn’t carrying anything. Across the road and onto and up to what is correctly known as The Hill of Death. We hadn’t really noticed how steep this was on the way in. I think we had been so relieved to be getting to the gate- and anyway we were walking downhill. Standing at the bottom of the hill and taking a swig from my bottle of water, it not only looked a lot steeper than I recalled, but seemed to go on forever. There were only a few people climbing it ahead of me and they seemed to be making extremely slow progress. Optimistically I figured out that it was because they were either not as fit as me, or had bad hangovers, or both.

To ensure I make rapid progress up the hill I lit up a ciggie and put my best foot forward. After a few minutes of huffing and puffing I realised it wasn’t as bad as I had thought. It was much, much worse. If there had been a man-made obstacle put in place to ensure getting from the site was difficult then it could not have been as effective as this ball-ache thrown up by Mother Nature. The few people on the hill ahead of me were pulling away as if they were experienced mountaineers and I was a city-boy who wasn’t used to walking on anything that wasn’t concrete. Actually, I’m not even very familiar with walking on concrete. Driving along tarmac is more my style.

On and on I yomped up the hill and when I got half-way up gritted my teeth and determined to do the rest of it in one go. After 15 minutes I had reached the top and the sweat was pouring out of me. How we would manage to get back up it on the way home with all our stuff did not bear thinking about for now. I was not looking forward to Amy and Sacha’s reaction though. Surely I would be nearly close to the car now and it would simply be a matter of a leisurely stroll across a couple of fields.