Glorious Glasto!

Every Glastonbury, Birmingham Friends of the Earth make their way down to the festival armed with a coach full of volunteers and lots of tea.

Birmingham FoE provide a free property lock up service and those of you who have been to festivals before will know how extremely rare it is to get anything for free there!

The lock up service allows all of the Glasto goers to leave their valuables in the safe hands of BFoE until they want it back. There are lots of lock ups situated around the site for the different camping locations and you can leave absolutely anything; keys, money, chairs, trolleys etc. They are open for business at 8:00am on Wednesday until 4:00pm on the Monday and they are staffed by the volunteers all day and night.

We also give out lots of loo roll, as you can see!

This year was my second Glastonbury with Birmingham Friends of the Earth. While I was there I worked a total of 24 hours, but still got to do and see so much. Though there's nothing about it that feels like work, everyone is there for the same reasons and it creates a really great atmosphere within the camp. Volunteering with BFoE at Glastonbury was great fun; I meet loads of fantastic people, watched some brilliant live performances and helped raise money for future BFoE campaigns and events!

Rosie Cervelli

Back from Glastonbury

The Glastonbury festival is absolutely unique. It is the one festival where the music is almost incidental to whether or not you have a good time. There is music everywhere and most of it you just stumble upon. Blur was a major highlight, but apart from them, just wandering around was the best thing about it for me and all my plans to see this band or that went out of the window (or would have done if I'd had any windows.

The four lock-ups run by Birmingham FoE volunteers did a great job of keeping people's stuff safe and providing miles of free loo paper (although most people gave us very generous donations for it) to desperate punters. I haven't found out how much we raised yet, but the indiocations are that it was a very good total and will again provide invaluable financial assistance for our group. A huge thank you to everyone who came along and especially to the organisers who made it possible.

We also had some very fetching masks and displays about the food

chain campaign at the stalls and got some postcards signed. Personally, I would have liked to have been able to do some

campaigning away from the business end of the lock-ups. Greenpeace had a whole field for doing that with a mock airport and model Sipton village. I also had my face painted blue by Oxfam for their climate change campaign and saw green police everywhere, which was fun. Hopefully, next year we can get in on the act and talk to people about our campaigns a little more.

It was still very much worth going and gave everyone a great break, while being able to do something useful too.