26th June: Glastonbury Festival

Glastonbury festival is back. After having 2018 off as a fallow year, the 2019 festival starts today. Here are 10 things you might not know about Glastonbury festival.

1. It wasn't always known as Glastonbury Festival. Between 1914 and 1925 there was a classical music festival in the town of Glastonbury which was called the Glastonbury Festival. Hence when Michael Eavis began his event in 1970, it was called the Worthy Farm Pop Festival instead. It was also referred to as the Pilton Festival or the Pilton Pop Party until 1981, when it was renamed the Glastonbury Festival.
2. The first festival was on September 19 1970, which happened to be the day after Jimi Hendrix died. Tickets cost just £1 (£15 in today's money) and free Milk from local farms was included in the price. There were eight acts, with T Rex as the headliners after the Kinks pulled out. Michael Eavis stated that he'd organised the festival in order to pay off debts, expecting about 5,000 people to show up. Only 1,500 people did, and Eavis actually made a loss. Today, the allocation of 175,000 tickets sell out immediately they go on sale, even though a ticket sets you back £238. Eavis makes enough profit virtually every year to be able to make sizable donations to causes such as Oxfam, Greenpeace and WaterAid. The only other year the festival made a loss was 2008, the year of the banking crisis.
3. The venue for the festival, Worthy Farm, is a working dairy farm, producing 10,000 litres of milk a day. Allegedly, Michael Eavis still gets up at 5.30am to milk the Cows. The cows are kept indoors for the ten weeks before the festival so there won't be any cow pats on the site. Every few years, there is a "fallow year" when the festival doesn't happen, to let the site recover.
4. Some statistics: there are more than 100 stages on over 1,000 acres of land (500 football pitches), 2,000 performers and the BBC broadcasts the festival to 30 countries. There are more than 4,500 Toilets, 100,000 rolls of Toilet paper - in 2007, apparently there were 2,485 miles of toilet roll on site, enough to reach from London to Baghdad. There are over 40,000 bins, reservoirs holding 2 million litres of water and 10 miles of security fencing. About 30 megawatts of Electricity is used throughout the festival, equivalent to the power used by the city of Bath which has a population of over 84,000. It costs about £22 million to stage the festival but it will usually make £82 million.
5. Thanks to downpours in 1997 which turned the site into a quagmire, Glastonbury Festival has ever since been associated with rain and mud, although the weather isn't always abysmal - in 2002, the welfare tent handed out 40,000 tubes of sun block.
6. None of these statistics got Glastonbury into the Guinness Book of Records, though. What it's in the record books for is Juggling. In 1984, 826 people juggled at least 3 objects to keep 2,478 objects in the air at once.
7. Another notable year was 1987, when thieves stole hundreds of pairs of Trousers from people's tents in order to pick the pockets. This resulted in hundreds of embarrassed people having to walk around in their underwear until the trousers were found, dumped in a muddy ditch.
8. So who is the man behind all this? Michael Eavis was born in 1935 and christened Athelstan Joseph Michael Eavis. His father was a Methodist preacher who died when Michael was just 19, leaving him 150 acres of land, 60 cows and an overdraft. Michael abandoned his plans to go to sea with the Merchant Navy and came home to run the farm. He got the idea of holding a pop festival after sneaking through a hedge to see Led Zeppelin at the Shepton Mallet Blues Festival in 1971. Now in his 80s, he is a clean-living guy who believes everyone should live by Christian moral values - he goes to Methodist chapel every Sunday, swims for 30 minutes in one of the farm's reservoirs daily and is anti-smoking, anti-drinking and anti-drugs. “This whole festival thing is better than alcohol, better than drugs,” he said, in 2017. One of Eavis's eccentricities is always wearing shorts, even to smart events. He confessed that the reason for this was that once, when he was wearing shorts for an anti-bomb, anti-Thatcher CND march taking place on a warm day, his GP's wife commented on what amazing legs he had.
9. The iconic Pyramid Stage has been around since 1981. In the beginning, the stage was was made of corrugated Iron and telegraph poles and was used as a cowshed for the rest of the year.
10. If you don't want to spend £238 to experience a few days of crowds and grotty toilets, you could become a celebrity and fork out £9,000 for a "glamping" tent which comes with proper bathrooms and flushing toilets, double beds, a TV and possibly even a butler. Huge stars such as Glastonbury attracts these days are hardly going to rough it with the rest of us!

The Raiders Trilogy

Book One

Book Three

Book Two

   

Power Blaster is a superhero who lives in a dimension not unlike our own, in the mega-nation of Innovia. No-one knows who he is or where his powers come from. 
After saving the life of the President several times, Power Blaster learns that a test of a nuclear warhead to defend the planet against asteroid strikes will have devastating consequences for his world and sets out to prevent it.

Power Blaster's actions lead to an unexpected result - a wormhole opens between his dimension and our own. Anyone in the vicinity is pulled through. People from diverse backgrounds and cultures must co-operate to survive and learn to live with the powers travel through the wormhole has bestowed on some of them.

A stable wormhole is established between the two dimensions. Power Blaster is determined to bring Desi Troyes, the person responsible for the bomb, to justice. Help comes from some rather unexpected sources. Meanwhile, Shanna Douglas sets out on a mission of her own, to find out if there is a cure for the life altering condition the wormhole gave her friend, Benedict Cole. Little does she know that she will stumble upon the secret of Power Blaster's mysterious origins.