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A drop or two of rain at Glastonbury!

The previous article on Glastonbury showed the Yeo Valley team assembling the stand on rock-hard, sun-baked ground in Monday's sweltering temperatures. Well, as you probably know, something changed with the weather on the Friday!

On Thursday, the first full day of trading, the weather was still hot and sunny and the Yeo Valley stand had a record day, selling big pots of yogurt for just £1 and frozen yogurt for £2.

"You guys rock!" said one festival regular "this is the best value stand at the Festival! I've been eating Yeo Valley yogurt since you were here last year. You are the only stand not charging more for your products than the supermarket prices!"

In the hot sunshine the only use for an umbrella on Thursday was to shelter in the shade. Business was brisk and much appreciated.

All was about to change, though! At 4.00am on Friday morning the first rumble of an increasingly deafening thunder and lightning storm woke us up and the rain started, gentle at first, then a deluge. The baked earth couldn't soak up the water and little puddles became big lakes within minutes. The electricity supply was switched off for fear of electrocution, due to power lines and connectors being submerged, so the diesel fridge units on the Yeo Valley chilled and frozen lorries were started - we helped neighbouring stands by storing their frozen pasties and pies for them.

As a small stream appeared in the front of the stand, it did not dampen the sprits of a few hardy souls who enjoyed a yogurt for their breakfast. The water began to rise at the front of the stand, this became worse at the back, as our tents became flooded. All of our belongings had to be evacuated into the back of the lorry.

Even further behind us the flood became serious as the toilets began to float! Within our stand, the Yeo Valley team tried to keep as dry as possible.

The rain stopped, eventually, and at midday, The Undertones started playing on the Pyramid Stage. All around us was water but the Yeo Valley team worked on. We were thankful of our pallet flooring in the stand which meant we could keep our feet and, more importantly, the fridges and freezers, dry.

By Saturday, the water had receded to leave, soft, gooey mud everywhere. People were to be seen wallowing in it - they obviously didn't know about the floating toilets!!

The mud in front of the stand put lots of people off coming to us while other hardy soles just braved the mud and kept coming.

In front of the main Pyramid Stage, all grass had disappeared beneath four inches of soft mud and those watching Saturday night's bands Keane, The Killers, New Order and Coldplay developed a strange fixed-feet dance routine and had to be helped out of the holes they had created at the end of each set!

Sunday morning dawned warm and sunny. Hurray! The soft mud started to dry a bit and became very sticky - we saw lots of people stride confidently forward only to leave a wellie behind, and quite a few fell face-first into the goo. The front of our stand now resembled a first world war battlefield (without the trenches, barbed wire and artillery) so we laid out some pallets to help people reach us.

By eight o'clock on Sunday morning, still not many people about but we were ready for them. Half an hour later the queues started and a roaring trade began in the sun.

By this stage, we were finally thinking that the worst was over and nothing else could go wrong. Then something strange happened with the articulated lorry trailer behind the stand:

We noticed that the back end had gone up, this could only mean one thing, the front end must have gone down.

The legs had sunk three foot into the ground in spite of resting on sections of railway sleepers, the rising water-table had softened the earth so much that they drove two, two foot by one foot, holes into the earth. A neighbour’s tent had a luck escape by being only slightly crushed!

There then followed some frantic human-chain activity inside the trailer as we moved five pallets of yogurt, case-by-case, to the back. A very large fork-lift then raised the front of the trailer and huge sleepers were placed under the stands. No damage done thankfully.

Back to our customers - they were enjoying the frozen yogurt whilst Jools Holland and his big band played great R&B.

For older articles, please click on the archive links to the right.