Crack

Dear Secret Garden Party,

I am writing the most sincere, effusive, generous thank you. Mecca for the mad, the playful, the brightly coloured and the downright daft, this year you surpassed yourself. What other verdant patch of gently rolling fields would provide a helter skelter, a ferris wheel seemingly powered by Hendrix and Radiohead and intense sessions of blimp-based pyromania.
How we laughed as we rowed across your lush lake, seven red riding hoods facing imminent piracy from a roaming waterbound wolf. What mirth was made as we took part in a naked sculpture in the Colisillyum, a vast ampitheatre made of hay bales. I know not of any other festival where a stranger would so readily strip their clothes and allow a team of artists to dress their crotch with a real tiger head and a fez, and then stay still for an hour.
Music took a hefty sidestep for pure hedonism. I don’t doubt that the bands that played were delightful, and masters of their trade, but I saw little of it. Whilst Pete Molinari played, I swam in the deep chaos of the oversized ball pit in the Jungle tent, being thrown into the air by a French acrobat. Whilst Darwin Deez wowed the crowd with his mid set callisthenics at the delectable Where The Wild Things Are stage, I was swinging on a trapeze in the circus tent with two small children hanging from my toes.
You provided us with the perfect grown up playground, but imposed no rules. We laughed til we cried when you set up the obstacle course down the hill – plastic sheeting, wooden pallets, two children’s trikes, two blindfolded men, and a river at the bottom of the hill – dreams. And the heavenly treat of the annual paint fight, as beautiful neon clouds floated into the sky and cast celestial dust onto the delighted revellers below.
We were transformed into Cheshire cats as Mercury Rev played the festival out to soaring synth. The perfect end to a perfect festival. You are lovely, just as you are. I hope I can come back next year.

Yours, (I love you so much I have a new chamber in my heart and it is full of memories of you)


Words: Megan Orpwood-Russell

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