The days have been so busy that I've fallen behind on this blog - but it is briefly time to think back a fortnight to 3 very damp, muddy, beautiful days in Devon.

I think the first thing that struck us was that this was a younger festival that the previous ones - here we were older and had distinctly less tattoos and piercings than the majority! Beautiful Days is the Levellers festival, they are a band popular with "New Age Travellers", and in the campervan field were lots of older, well used campervans - the £40,000 motor homes that had surrounded us at previous festivals were no longer in evidence - here were vans we could afford, but might struggle to maintain.

The nature of this festivals was also different. Five different venues mixing music and comedy meant that this was a mobile festival. People had chairs with them, but only to be placed down where they were before moving on to the next venue. You could see people popping in for a while and then moving on - festival surfing, channel hopping with feet. And then the mud came - on Saturday we woke to persistent rain, nobody seemed to move for the whole morning, we just snuggled down listening to the Olympics. When we did venture out the rain was still falling and the site had turned to mud - made worse by all the movement, whereas at Cropredy, people had stayed in the seats as it rained - here they kept moving and the site got muddier and muddier but still we headed for the venues we wanted - and found surprises in store. I was keen to see the poet John Cooper Clarke - but where he should have been was a Skunk (Skiffle-Punk) band called Hobo Jones and the Junkyard Dogs - they were brilliant (and John Cooper Clarke was poorly - or kidnapped by Hobo Jones to ensure they got the gig!)

By Sunday the rain had stopped, but the site was now a mudbath with the obligatory slides down the hill, mud rivers through the campsites and visits to the furthest away venues were a major expedition if you hoped to stay upright. All good fun - and then we had to leave. We were up early Monday morning, waited for some gaps to emerge which meant that we could get to the gate without going up the central mudpath - and with the help of a little push to get going we were free and on the road to the north. I believe we were lucky, some were stuck there until late into that Monday evening.

Beautiful Days was good fun, we found some good music - usually away from the main stage, we enjoyed the art work and the performance artists that were all around the site. There was a vibrant atmosphere that welcomed these two strangers into their community.

And it is the nature of community, and belonging to a community that I found myself reflecting upon - more of that another time.

It was time for home, quick visit to Leicester; return the campervan to Derby and back to see Hannah and get ready for Greenbelt.