Day 37: I Attend The 'Festival Hippie' in Matha (Pop. 2,167)

I've only ever been to one festival, and that was a wanky middle-class one full of people called Henrietta off their tits on badly-rolled low-grade skunk, meeting all their advertising pals in the vodka tent and shouting 'wicked!!' in loud home-counties accents across the rolling hills of Shropshire. (I hasten to add that I am a middle class wanker, but at least I know it.) One day I hope to be thin and unselfconscious enough to go to more festivals, and not ones full of people I might have worked with once in the Dark Days.

Last night, however, I was enticed to the 'Festival Hippie' in Matha by this super lifesize model stationed on the roundabout on the road to Angouleme. Matha (as you definitely won't already know) is a teeny tiny town with not much in it apart from 4 pharmacies, a supermarket and a bloke in a 2CV van, so we weren't expecting much.

I was, to be honest, both surprised and delighted. It was like I hear a real festival is like, but in miniature. 2 stalls of hippy tat, including bongs of various shades, patchwork pantaloons and Peruvian scarves; 1 tiny beer tent and some excellent banners which you can see above. (What relevance Marilyn Manson, Bob Marley (x4) and Johnny Halliday have to a hippy festival I couldn't tell you, but then the French have never been famous for their contribution to popular music.) We ate nice sausages in bread, drank local beer, and waved at our friends. It was nice. Small, but nice. And not really like a festival. But nice.

The musical highlight of the last night of this 3-day extravaganza was Ronnie Carryl (short, bearded, long hair) who is distinguished by having played guitar with Phil Collins, and known to the French as 'Ronnie-Carryl-Guitariste-Phil-Collins'. He got his childhood mate Charlie up on stage (Charlie is, we guessed, a quantity surveyor from Godalming), and Charlie sang badly.

The people working on the door let in someone with a goat on a string, but wouldn't let in a braying middle-class English woman who was trying to smuggle in a half bottle of wine with a screw-top. ("But I live here!" "And?"). We couldn't find the car, of course, even though there were only about 30 cars in the car park, but then from what I hear, it wouldn't be a festival if you could find your car easily. I know the only time I ever went to a festival it took us 3 hours to find the Micra.

Can't blame them for trying, although somehow Johnny Halliday banners, Blur on the PA and the following sign, spied at the entrance to the 'site' (i.e. field next to barn owned by the local community) tells me they might (just) have missed the point: