Mud, Mystics, Music and Hippies

Last Updated on 17/11/2019 by Alex Squire

On 1 July I went to a local music festival called Shanti Fest, which was organised by a charity called Lincs2Nepal. All the money raised from the festival is going to go into funding their aid projects in Nepal, so it was all in a good cause.

It was a very hippyish type of festival, with lots of people in baggy psychedelic clothes. As much as possible of the stages and tents in the festival grounds were made from recycled materials. So they were trying to be quite eco-friendly too which always helps.

The problem though was there was mud everywhere, and I mean EVERYWHERE. It was like a ploughed field in places, a place more suited to tractors than wheelchairs.

I was in my Powerchair which was a good job because otherwise I think my carer would have probably given himself a hernia trying to push me around this field. Even though I was trying to power my way through the mud at full speed I still managed to frequently get stuck, roughly about every five minutes.

I would then have to get rocked, pulled and shaken while frantically wheel spinning trying to free myself from the Earth’s muddy grip, often just digging myself deeper.it

Luckily I was never stuck for more than about five minutes each time, but I still had visions of having to call out the fire brigade to rescue me.

Navigating the festival grounds was a mission, as it was like a minefield of mud traps. My carer had to walk in front of me trying to pick out a safe path for me to follow. But even so, most of the time it was impossible to avoid the mud, and it was more just a case of trying to find the path of least resistance.

There were mini tractors and diggers driving around the site with big caterpillar tracks, which I eyed with jealousy. I wish I had caterpillar tracks on my Powerchair as then rolling over a muddy wasteland would be a breeze.

Wherever the diggers went they would churn up the earth even more and leave nice big tracks behind them for me to get stuck in.

Apart from mud there were a number of different alternative therapists and mystics there offering Reiki, Yoga, massage and a tarot card reader. I went to see the tarot card reader which I’d never done before.

She did the reading in a temporary hut made out of bamboo canes and covered with cloth. To start she said a prayer. After literally one sentence of the prayer the hut was suddenly battered with wind and rain, and the cloth gave little protection to us.

I thought “Blimey! That’s a powerful prayer!”

After the storm subsided we continued with the reading, and she told me that I should have a massage to relax me. To be honest she was not wrong because I have been feeling tense recently and have had trouble relaxing.

I wanted to get a head massage off another of the therapists that were there, but I ran out of time in the end.

I had bought tickets for two days of the festival but I didn’t go back for the second day because I didn’t think it was worth battling with the mud again. Back in June I went to a festival called Mud Fest, which ironically had much LESS mud than Shanti Fest.

Oh yeah, there was also apparently some music going on but I was mostly preoccupied with playing mud minesweeper.

I had wanted to go to Glastonbury but thinking about it I would probably not make it out alive. Glastonbury in terms of mud is a million times worse than what was at Shanti Fest, so it would probably be suicide.

I will look for less muddy festivals to attend in future.