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I lazily opened one eye and tried to judge what the time was by the amount of light filtering into the tent. I reckoned that it must have been around 6am. Once you have been to enough music festivals, you learn to read these sorts of things.

It was the first morning of the four day long party called Thornfest. I clambered around the mess that was my tent until I eventually found my phone. It read 06:12am. I was close enough. ‘Rise and shine’, I thought to myself, ‘don’t let the fact that you have only had two and a half hours sleep get you down,’ I found my jacket and a pair of sunglasses that didn’t belong to me and stumbled out of the tent. ‘Good morning.’ said my neighbours. I could tell by looking at them that they had not slept. They looked a little worse for wear and were still gulping down beer.

I always like getting up early at festivals to do a bit of people-watching. You can see people that have fallen asleep on stranger’s camping chairs because they could not find their tents and those who are awake, all be they horribly intoxicated, and still trying to find their tents. It’s a little sad to see but in their defence, when you have thousands of tents all stuck up close to each other, it’s a little difficult to get around and all of them are either brown, green or navy-blue.

My drunken neighbours offered me some of the bacon and eggs that they were merrily frying up and I accepted. Who am I to turn down a free breakfast? Halfway through my much-needed meal I heard a rustling in my mate’s tent and greeted her with a big smile. As she stepped out she gave me one look and greeted me with the universal hand signal for ‘please don’t make such a noise, I’m hung-over’.

 ‘Sorry’, I said to her “How did you sleep? Or should I say, did you sleep?’

‘I think I passed out at about 5am.’ She replied while holding a cold bottle of water up against her forehead.

I held out my plate and offered her a bit of bacon but she gave me a sideways glance and shook her head. I feel sorry for people that go over-board on the first night. They don’t seem to bear in mind that it is a four day long festival and they don’t need to squeeze four days into the first ten hours. Another person suddenly popped his head out of my friend’s tent. I had never seen this guy before and knew better than to ask her so I just smiled.

I reached my hand into my handbag and grabbed the bands list. One hundred bands play at this festival and there were only a handful I was interested in watching. I put six drinks into my cooler bag and gave my friend one.

‘Drink up, girl,’ I said, ‘tonight we do it all again.’