Shelter from the storm

Today I was at the tiny, ‘eco-friendly’ Tandem Festival, held at an Outdoor Education Centre near Oxford. Hill End’s normal life is either cramming children into dormitories after a day of newts and willow dens or training adults - I’ve been taught hedge-dating, strimming and apple-tree pruning there.
 
It was a great venue for a day when torrential rain and lightning were forecast since it has solid buildings as well as festival marquees. The Green Dragon room provided a roof over the Ugandan kora player and the refugee week films while this whimsically decorated barn, which I snuck into as it was being prepared, hosted Nightscapes’s Street Theatre from Maastricht and a bunch of exuberant Hungarian dancers. The branches are wrapped in pages from books and hung with books and crockery.
 
This afternoon, in the festival’s mobile bike-repair workshop, I was taking the damaged back wheel off my bike and listening to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony wafting across the field from Sinfonia Gaia on the main stage. It’s a piece of music I know quite well so when the fourth movement (Thunder. Storm) began I was pleased that the person showing me how to tighten spokes, who didn't know it, said that the music sounded just like a storm. But we were both astonished as the promised rain started to bucket down just at that moment. We dragged the bikes and tools under a gazebo and sheltered until the fifth movement (Happy and thankful feelings after the storm) started when, believe it or not, the sun came out.