Belladrum

So after approximately 7 hours back in London, enough time to scrub off the 4 day grime and wash my clothes, I left the very sensible Ange to enjoy the novelty of sleeping in a bed, and met up with Lea for the 12 hour bus trip up to Inverness. We joined hundreds punk kids, kilted 20 somethings, hippies and families for the 2 day Belladrum festival up in the Scottish highlands.
Scottish sausages!

This is the first kind of overnighter festival I've been to, where everyone camps next to the festival site and stumbles on through the gates the following morning. And I say stumbled in the very true sense of the word...for that Thursday evening and night and indeed well into the morning in the Belladrum fields was one of the craziest things I've experienced in a while! With friends Emma, Cheryl and Ross, Lea and I pitched out tent down the bottom of the field, kind of out of the way and a convenient distance from the foul smelling festival loos. Within a few hours it was tent to tent as every available space was filled.
Lea and I get into the festival spirit with our classy 'glasses' of red wine!

And then came the beers. And the music. And the whole place just took off. As we old grannies crawled into our sleeping bags around midnight, the rest of the majority teenage population were merely settling into a drinking and very loud music routine that they would continue unabated for the next 36 hours or so! Indeed, waking up the following morning around 6am the noise and music was just as loud as it had been 6 hours previously...and the festival hadn't even begun!

Over the next 2 days we saw loads of awesome bands across 5 stages. Faves included The Dingleberries (bagpipe rock; yes, only in Scotland!), The Cinematics, the celtic influenced fiddle band 3 Daft Monkeys, and Welsh rockers The Automatic. We'd met them earlier in the day at a signing session (in the absence of anything else Lea and I got them to sign our arms...ha ha felt just like a 14 year old!) and again jumping up and down in the mosh pit mud to their massive hit 'Monster'.


But the thing that really blew us away happened at the end of the festival, on the Sunday morning as everyone was leaving. And silly me for thinking that packing up your campsite would actually involve packing up. Ah no. Not for these kids. Cause you see it's far too much hassle to actually roll up your sleeping mat, stuff the sleeping back back in its cover and pack up the tent. Just as it appears too much hassle to put those cool canvas folding chairs, complete with the beer holder section in the arm, back in their case. And why bother packing up left over food and beer, or BBQs, or tables, or gumboots, clothes or ANYTHING when you can just leave it all lying there and save yourself the hassle of carting it back the 200m to your car! Especially when you can pick up another 'complete camping kit' from Tescos for £19.99. It was unbelievble. Lea and I took a walk round the campsite and I swear there was enough stuff simply left there to shelter, feed and clothe the entire homeless population of Scotland, or to make rich any entrepreneurial type who took the time to collect up the (no less than) 60 tents, sleeping bags and the like, clean them up and sell them on ebay.
One of the abandoned campsites at Belladrum

It was disgusting, really. Both in the sheer laziness of the kids who would rather leave someone else to clean up their mess, and in their attitude toward a throw away society.
Anyway, as advocates of the 'reuse' component of 'reduce, reuse, recycle' Lea and I spent a fascinating hour rummaging around and collected all sorts of goodies which we hauled back to Edinburgh. Including a dozen beers, a blow up air mattress, 2 sleeping mats and loads of unopened packets of chips and stuff!!