Friday 6th August

Tonight, straight after work, we're off to the Hevy Festival at Port Lympne Wild Animal Park in Kent - a zoo/safari park I haven't been to since I lived in Folkestone and an undoubtedly unusual place for a rock festival - so Rich comes round to pick K and I up in his brilliant gold Chrysler. After gathering Mike and Big Nick we head out onto the M25 and slowly make our way through the Friday evening traffic and the unspeakably bleak architecture of the Dartford Crossing. Inevitably, given that we are about to get to a field and attempt to put up tents in the dark, it starts raining around halfway down the M20 - a weird, fine mist that doesn't bode particularly well.

We get to the park at around 9.30, just as the last light is fading, and find a smaller campsite and arena set up than any of us were expecting. Not that I quite know what to expect - the last time I went to a music festival for a full weekend was the Reading Festival in 2001, and while I know this is a much smaller, probably nicer prospect, I've spent the intervening nine years dreading the next time I would have to sleep in a tent surrounded by pissed teenagers. That said, K is a big fan of the whole festival thing, as are most of our friends, and since the line up for Hevy looks fun (plus we got on the guest list) I thought I should finally give it another try.

For a little while though I'm not sure I've made the right choice. We queue for ages to get through a fairly shambolic security procedure, then proceed to put up our quite large tent in near total darkness and irritating rain. The ground is also incredibly hard, and without a proper mallet to hand we succeed only in bending all our pegs and getting into a bit of a row. At this point, I cannot see a single possible upside to this.

However, by the time it's finally up and I have a beer in my hand all fury is forgotten. The rain eases off and we get on with the business of getting drunk on this first, band-less evening of the festival. We wander the short distance towards the incredibly compact 'arena' section, and are promptly turned away for carrying alcohol (but only after K somehow makes it through with a full 2-litre bottle of Strongbow, which she none-too-subtly then reveals to the incredulous security man).

Instead we finish our cans and go through to catch the very end of whatever was going on in here, standing around drinking the £3.50 cans of San Miguel one can exclusively purchase from the bar tent. No matter - it's only the first night after all - and eventually we head back to our little group of tents and sit around chatting until it's time to wipe out. This will be my first night sleeping in a tent for well over two years (and the last time was a deeply horrible sleeping bag-less frozen nightmare) and my intricate preparation involves being drunk enough that I pass out without noticing.