Charles Spencer

Uncool fun

Charles Spencer goes to Guilfest

issue 12 July 2008

My body aches, my bones creak and I have a nagging headache that paracetamol won’t shift. It’s a bit like having a hangover again, but mercifully without the attendant guilt.

As I write, my son Ed, his friend Ollie and I have just spent the weekend at Guilfest, accurately and succinctly billed in the Daily Telegraph’s bumper festival preview a few weeks ago as ‘An unlikely success. Not bothered with cool, thus unpretentious fun.’

What I like best about this festival, held each year in Stoke Park on the outskirts of prosperous Guildford, is that it’s just 20 minutes down the A3 from our house and has plenty of parking. This means that I don’t have to sleep under canvas and can come back home each night to the comforts of my own bed and bathroom. At 53 these things begin to matter.

There were lots of people in their fifties at Guilfest, quite a few in their sixties, and one or two who looked as if they were in their seventies and even eighties.

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