Glastonbury - U2 Day

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The piano manoeuvre

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Anyone for camping?

I'm luckier than most campers at Glastonbury. Every noon I awake alone under a thick canopy of leaves in a cluster of ancient trees within a fenced-off forest behind the King's Meadow - effectively my own private woods, compete with shade, cool air, and trickling stream. Perfect shelter from the rain.

It says something about the power of a good festival when people are willing to endure the drizzle, mud, toilets and crowds just to be here. But then you see the oddest magical things at Glastonbury - like a police horse watching the Wu Tang Clan, naked Morris dancers pushing a peddle-powered sound system and two sets of wellies still standing on a sludgy junction with owners mysteriously vanished.

Our piano bar is shaping up. A rouges' gallery has been set up where the live act will play opposite and face their most vocal critics. But the main action today has been piano replacement. The original upright piano went out of tune. And so in a dubiously impossible Laurel and Hardy manoeuvre it was lifted onto two scaffold bars, balanced precariously under eight sets of near-buckled bodies and ferried supernaturally across the Scared Circle, before its replacement was shimmied back, and into the starting position to open the venue at midnight.

There is much to choose from before then - theatre, comedy, film, exhibitions. And then there's music. U2 are headlining. They perhaps don't have the same street cred of prime time rivals DJ Shadow or Primal Scream, who'll be playing their seminal Screamadelica beginning to end. And Bono maybe doesn't instantly fit the traditional Glasto bill in the way Billy Bragg or Morrissey do. So they're will be some expectation when the Dubliners step onto to the Pyramid Stage in a couple of hours.

But first, let's try that Pimms.

John Bela Reilly