Brace yourself for a boredom tornado; I went to a PC factory in Germany. Now, I'm expecting yawns, ann switching off of eyes everywhere now, and that's justified and right, I'm sure. But unlike you utter bastards out there, I found it both stimulating and fascinating. Waves of solder rising up to just clip motherboards, hard drives are flashed in seconds, a complete computer from nothing in less than twenty minutes. Makes you feel cheated to be paying a thousands pounds a whack... Oh, and I'm sick of press trips where I get sent out to a foreign country for a day, only to find that I'm staying in generic hotel Z, and eating Mexican food with people who can't quite communicate with me, whether through language barriers or otherwise. Everywhere I go it's the same story; whisked through, shielded from this spectacular location. Grr.

Faux Faulkner et al Glorious parodies of over-egged American scribblers.

The first thing is I went on a balloon ride. Let me explain this; my body is a temple (in severe need of reconsecration, sure, but a temple all the same.) It does not tolerate extremes of any sort, and height just happens to be one of those.

Right, so Glastonbury story no #395,121

So I've bought some mushrooms. It's just after the Flaming Lips have finished playing. Here's maybe 80,000 people in a big lego crowd in front of me, all multi-coloured little blobs shifting about a bit, and Radiohead are due on next so no-one's moving any direction but closer to the stage.

Except yours truly, obviously, cos I'm off to the new bands tent. I've had a few tokes on Leeloush's camberwell carrot, and I'm distinctly dazed, so I ask one of the few people walking the same way as me for directions.
"Ehm" I sez, with my inimitable Hugh Grant incomprehensible stumbling voice "Do you know where the new bands tent is"
"yes" says the strangely high-voiced bear.
"Good" says I, oddly unperturbed by said talking Rupert.
So off we went, with a trumpety trump to the circus tent. where John Cale, psychotic ex-Underground Velveteen booties is supposed to be playing. Except he's not yet, and there's about three hundred misanthropes standing under a big empty gaudy tent, with the walls torn off, in perfect absolute silence.
The bear disappears into the night, and I start to wait.

After a while my chest hurts. I realise that the two litres of vodka and coke I've drunk while watching the Lips has inured me somewhat to the cold, but only temporarily. And now the cold's eaten through the voddy, and in my t-shirt the only way to keep warm is to curl into a ball on the floor. So I do, in the middle of the crowd.

(Nobody notices.)

Which is when Mr Cale graces us with his presence. He sings a few numbers I don't recognise, then a few I do in a sort of "fuck you, I saw the beatniks" attitude, which consists of random intonation and screaming every now and then, then refuses to play an encore and leaves us to disperse.

So I stagger back through the departing crowds of Radioheads, but of course my mates are long gone by the time I get there. Children and adults are roaming the enormous empty field gathering scrap litter to pile on the hundreds of little fires that have been started. It strikes me as a both a massively useful method of disposing of the detritus of ten thousand, and also massively romantic, so I sit down and watch from the top of the hill, where my friends were.

Wake up in the morning with more chest pains than a George Best impersonator.

Bizarre. And I never even ate the mushrooms.

The music van