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Again, thunderstorms. I remember, as a child, shaking, in the front room of my mum and dad’s old house, at each clap of thunder, jumping as each flash of lightening as thin as razors crept around the edges of the dark red curtains and pierced the room with sudden life, every person in the room framed in sudden shock. We were not a religious family but they told us all about God in school and thunder seems plausible proof of a higher (and angry) power to a small child. Soon my Dad would come back from the kitchen with matches and candles, with a drink of some sort, the gas would still be on and so tea, or hot orange with a spoonful of brown sugar in maybe, could be made on the hob. As much as the storm would scare me I loved the company of my family together, cheering each other up with jokes, stories, hot drinks and warm hugs.

As I got older I learned to love the excitement of a good storm and hoped for bigger, louder, wilder weather. If I was lucky then maybe the town would be flooded – I didn’t think of the people affected, even though some were our friends, I would only imagine the wonder of the changed landscape; how the coastline was now so much nearer; how school friends could canoe down roads; boats moored on dry land washing out to sea and ending up God knows where. The excitement of a young teenager on a scout trip, sleeping on the stone floor of an abandoned old French storage building above the Ardeché river, thinking of tomorrow’s wild trip down stream with the faster flowing rapids. Standing in the back garden of my house in Winchmore Hill with my house mates, on Charlotte’s birthday, as the large hot drops soaked us through on that wild spring night always safe in the knowledge that there are people around you to enjoy that small quiver of nervous fear with and a king sized bed with several mattresses on in the house to curl up in and sleep soundly.

And then Glastonbury. Waking up, on your own, to the mother of all storms, in the very early hours of the morning and hoping that it would soon be over quickly, as other festival storms had been, with enough rain to wash the dust from the roads, form small puddles in the market place that would soon dry out and leave behind cooler, more pleasant a temperature for the coming days. I try and sleep and, after a while, the storm dies and I drift off for an hour. Again, loud crashes jolt me awake. I wait, it dies and I sleep. Next time in is louder, right overhead in the morning time. Small drops of rain permeate their way through the canvass and tickle the back of my neck. All I think to do is try and sleep through it but each new drop feels like a small wet needle poking me into life and depriving me of the sleep I so dearly crave. I knew it would be far wetter, muddier than I had hoped but I thought; leave it till tomorrow when I have the energy, why worry know. Then I started hearing screaming, a girls voice in short bursts every few minutes, the lightening three or four times a minute, the thunder louder and louder all around, and the gap between the two not worth counting for any distance. Without warning the floor of my tent is rolling and I can hear the water rushing past outside. I unzip my tent to see the river I am now camped in flowing through my porch and I hear the voices of my friends I am camped with shouting at anyone who has not appeared from their tent yet. Could someone sleep through this? Have they left to go somewhere already? I start grabbing clothes from my tent and stuffing them in the green recycling bin liner given to me, thank God, as I came into the festival. It is a race against the rising river that sloshes inside my tent. In goes my sleeping bag, I will need that, what else? Where did I put all my money? I find my wallet and pull the notes from the pages of my book; A Farewell To Arms, that will be sacrificed alongside my new straw hat and God knows what else for I grab things wildly trying to estimate what the bag will hold and what I might need, what might be OK if left. I have time to through on a few clothes that are not already soaking and I look for shoes – both pairs gone; drifting down stream to pile up with the litter from the camp-site and the belongings that we were too slow or too despairing to save. I drag myself from the tent letting in buckets of brown water in as I leave. Everyone stands around outside deciding what to go back inside for. Other tents have come loose and float down into ours trying to drag down as many as possible with them. We watch as cider bottles, handbags and rubbish flows speedily through. We carefully negotiate the avoidance of a large wooden log that someone had been using as a bench but that and an abandoned tent snatch on my guy-ropes and pull my tent from its anchoring, tilting it on its side and condemning all left inside to the life aquatic. We try and smile at each other as we count what is already lost; wallets, cameras, shoes, toothbrushes and, in some cases, maybe everything. We hold onto items like sun-cream or Frisbees before laughing, announcing the uselessness of such a thing and sacrificing the item, with a careless toss, into the torrents.

Each night after this I have woken from the dream that the storm has returned and that once again I see the river run through my tent’s porch and I wake up afraid and on my own. Tonight I am as afraid as I was as a child. Afraid that the rain will build and build, that the storm will not be over soon enough. That the waters will rise into my house and destroy what is inside, what I treasure most; my books, my records and CDs, my guitar. There is no one else in the house. I am on my own and I feel silly but I am frightened. There is no one left to turn to for comfort. Thunderstorms I begin equating with loneliness. My back tenses. I feel my shoulder blades drawing into one another. My legs wanting to push up into my chest. I feel smaller and I long for someone to say “there, there” if only in friendly mocking.