You've bought it, now you must drink it like a man

Among the wonderful moments I passed at the Hop Farm Festival this weekend was waiting in the freezing night air for my sister at the exit to the arena while all the assorted drunks were driven out at the end of the evening.

We had got separated (never let them out of your sight) and I felt I mustn't go to bed until I had checked that she was alright. (It turned out she was asleep in her tent throughout.)

People were not allowed to take drink out of the arena with them. Rather than pour drinks away, already drunk people stood at the gates and attempted to down pints.

"You're encouraging binge drinking!" several protested. Still, they drank.

There was one wonderful individual there, a tall, thin man with a fantastic accent. Someone asked him where he was from. "I'm from Carrk," he said (my attempt to write the word "Cork" the way he said it).

He had an unaffected, laconic sense of humour and told the people who found themselves standing at the gate with him: "You've baaught it, now you must drink it like a man." For himself, he was ready to stand there in the freezing cold and take his time.

My investigations reveal that other Irish people make fun of Cork accents and people from Cork. I imagine it might get irritating if people talking in that accent were talking rubbish, but people talk rubbish in all sorts of other accents. To me this accent was pure music.

I was serving on one of the over-stretched bars during the festival. My only real regret of the weekend was one time actually applying the "Challenge 25" rule - you have to ask anyone that looks under 25 (at a music festival!) whether they have ID. Apologies to the young man affected, who was almost certainly over 18 but did not have ID, for turning him away. I'm sure that he would not be grateful to me for his lack of hangover in the morning.

But there's no time for such regrets. I must be a man: I've bought it and now I must taste the bitter consequences of my actions. Or, in the modern parlance, "suck it up".

Van is the man

I liked Van Morrison before I ever heard him. Van Morrison is to music what dark matter is to the universe:

In astronomy and cosmology, dark matter is matter that is inferred to exist from gravitational effects on visible matter and background radiation, but is undetectable by emitted or scattered electromagnetic radiation. [Wikipedia]

Of course, what I've just written is completely pretentious twaddle.

And, personally, I'd almost certainly heard some Van Morrison already without realising it, although it didn't feel like that when I went out and bought "Moondance", an unlikely pick of record for a teenager in the 1980s, on what felt like a hunch.

I haven't "loved him ever since", and I don't like all his stuff, and he's not my favourite artist, and I understand that sometimes he can turn in a lousy performance, but... on his night he is really great. I saw him this Friday at the Hop Farm Festival in Kent, his singing was great, his songs great, all the musicians were wonderful.

And when all's said and done he's just a working-class Belfast boy that loves music. Van Morrison shows what humans, some of them born very lowly, can do. Here are a few lines from his song "Philosophers Stone" which seemed to me most apt:

Out on the highways and the by-ways all alone
I'm still searching for, searching for my home
Up in the morning, up in the morning out on the road
And my head is aching and my hands are cold
And I'm looking for the silver lining, silver lining in the clouds
And I'm searching for and
I'm searching for the philosophers stone
And it's a hard road, Its a hard road daddy-o
When my job is turning lead into gold
He was born in the back street, born in the back street Jelly Roll...