The duck rises

I got tangled up in a bottle neck yesterday, somewhere between the John Peel stage, the Other Recharge Tent (biggest queues of the festival are at the phone charging points) and my campsite.

Even the queues here are fun. As a sea of people heading in one direction found themselves confronted by a sea of people heading in the other direction, separated by a line of people who'd been waiting in line for six hours to charge their phones, it became reasonably obvious that we'd have to resort ourselves to shuffling around a few steps at a time and that no-one was going anywhere fast.

Instead of tutting, an impromptu sing-a-long broke out, and we had a few bursts of Deliah, I will Survive and You're just too good to be true, before sorting ourselves out and making our way along.

The reason for the trip to the tent was to get the rum for our annual cocktail evening. It was supposed to be White Russians this year, but somehow we ended up with Mojitos. Not that I was complaining.

Then, nicely toasted, we headed off to watch Primal Scream (pretty good, but I spent at least half their set wandering back and forth to the loo) and to wait for the Stones.

Growing up in my parents house, I think I sort of absorbed a knowledge of the Stones and their music from Dad taking over the record player every Sunday when I was growing up. Consequently, it turned out that me and my sister knew more Rolling Stones songs than we thought we did, and were able to hold our own in a crowd of people in their t-shirts, or the current festival favourite - 'who the f*** is Mick Jagger?'

Press tent rumour has it that the outside world didn't approve of their performance, but like everything else in the real world, it doesn't really relate to what was happening inside the steel fence at Worthy.

For me, it was my 'I was there' moment. I sang and boogied my way through Honky Tonk Woman, Brown Sugar, went into raptures when they broke out my favourite Stones song, Wild Horses and watched awestruck as the duck on top of the Pyramid Stage awoke for the first time (too much to drink on Thursday undoubtedly) to join in for Sympathy for the Devil, and started flapping it's wings and belching fire while the crowds roared their approval.

To be fair, the phoenix was awesome. I took about 900 photos of it.

It was nice of Mick to dress up for us - lovely jacket, and a spangly jacket for the last few numbers.  It was hard to believe that the rubber-lipped, snake-hipped man strutting around in front of me is older than my dad.

Not bad at all.