Picture this. Summer (or that season when the rain gets fleetingly warmer that we laughingly refer to as such on the "green and sceptic isle") 1985. Yours truly is 25 years old, long of hair and beard, and undergoing a long distance affair with a lass from his home town (who it later transpired was screwing half of West Yorshire during my extended absences, but thats another sorry tale). Around comes the festival season, and the (then) newly reformed Deep Purple are playing Knebworth (about 30 miles north of London), and I'm living about 40 miles west of London). This seems like a bloody good oppotunity for a weekend of debauchery, so the GF and a couple of mates also with respective GF's make the 250 mile (wow, like I said, you'd go that far for a taco in the USA) trek down to my place. The mates by bike, the GF comes by train. The festivals an over nighter, so we head up there by train. One into London, one out, carrying tents, booze, the usual. Pitch camp, then hit the site.

This is August in England remmember. Of course it rains. We're drinking all fucking day, and this was before the "no bottles cans or any other container" rule at UK festivals, so we've got cider (in good old FOBBC form) gallon containers of home brew, vodka, the lot. It rains all fucking day, we're all wearing bike leathers, but we're still so wet our bloods getting thinned. It doesn't matter, we're also completely bladdered. By the time the Purps come on we're swaying ankle deep in mud.

Now Knebworth festival is held in a natural ampitheater. Great in the dry, but when it rains, well, for "natural ampitheater" read "bog". If you take ankle deep mud, basketball boots (not noted for their cleated soles), and a state of advanced intoxication, and the result is one Kellett with an bad case of "two steps, fall over". That trek back to the tent took what seemed like a year. Sometimes I felt like I needed to swim through the mud to make progress, at one point I even tried it, with the understanding GF laughing her (quite considerably sized if memory serves me well) tits off every inch of the way.

We eventually make it back to the tent (a feat in itself when alls said and done). Now, the GF had managed to remain upright, so all she has to do is remove her shoes and enter the tent to get out of wet clothes. However, I now resemble an ambulatory mud pie, and I'm greeted with "You're not coming into this tent unless you take your jeans off first" (best offer I had that day I tell you). I obliged, hung 'em over the tent pole in the forlorn hope that the rain might set them to rights overnight (amazing how optimistic you are when you completely 'faced isn't it) and crawled in for the obligatory post festival drunken fuck.

Next morning I crawl out to find that my much prized, seven years old and up to three layers of patches in places pair of wranglers look less like a garment and more like something from the bottom of a composter. There's no way I can wear them, especially on a train. Have I got an alternative? Course I havn't. All available space in the ruck sack was used for essentials (i.e. anything with a measurable alcohol content), not fripperies like clothing.

Fortunately, she's got a spare pair, and as I inferred before, shes not a small lass (5'8" and about 38-30-38). They fit, thank christ (though they were a bit tight around the old 'nads).

And so I made it home, hung over as stink wearing my girlfriends jeans. My own didn't survive the ordeal. Mould set in, so I had them humanely killed and given a decent burial.

Footnote:

A year later the girl in question dumped me so she could pursue her hobby of screwing her way through the 'phone book unhindered. Last I heard of her was a couple of years ago. She was aged 30, looked 40, hugely overweight and stuck in an abusive relationship with a Hells Angel. Not that I hold grudges or anything, but I had to laugh.

- Steve