Greenbelt

What a weekend! I am TOTALLY knackered. Got back last night (Mon) and have spent today printing out the dissertation (deathly deathly boring) and doing the washing. How does 4 days of camping produce so much washing?!?! Weird.

Anyway, on to the more interesting stuff. Greenbelt was fab. It was a huge site - covering virtually all of Cheltenham race course.
This was taken from the top of the grandstand - a space normally used for a panoramic restaurant but given over to "Soul Space" for the weekend. This was my favourite place - very quiet and chilled and very good for knitting in. Greenbelt was SO much bigger than last time I went (10 years ago). The site was humungous and there were about 17000 people at the Sunday morning Communion service:

(there was about the same size crowd behind where we were too!) I went to several talks - including Karen Armstrong (whose book, the Spiral Staircase, I blogged about a while ago) talking about Fundamentalism and Michelle Brown (from the British Library) talking about the Lindisfarne Gospels. I also did plenty of sitting around drinking tea and catching up with the large number of people I seemed to know. I went with my brother, sister-in-law and nephew sprog (camping with an 8 month old is hilarious, he was so fascinated by everything!). Then I bumped into a couple of school friends (Rachel & Em), Lizi (an ex housemate from my first degree) and her husband & sister, Jo (an ex housemate from my MA), Anne (whose blog I read) & her family and Penny, who I used to do Guides and Rangers with:

Penny and I managed an impromptu knitting meeting outside the Christian Aid tent. I think we represented both extremes - her jumper was on 10mm needles, my socks were on 2.5mm! I saw several other people knitting at the backs of talks and films.

The Crusoe socks are beginning to take shape. I found the pattern frustrating as the sizing was very strange. I converted the US shoe sizes to UK and started but that was way too small, so I worked out the stitch numbers myself after measuring my ankle. The stranded pattern is easy, but seems to reduce the stretchiness of the socks, making them harder to fit. I also wasn't sure if I liked it or not so decided to knit the feet in stocking stitch. I still keep changing my mind about them now. DPNs were also probably not the best idea for a festival either. I should really get some rubber bands or corks to stick on the ends after spending a lot of time over the weekend picking up stitches!

There were plenty of stalls and shops to look at, and a particularly good bookshop in one marquee. I got two books that are kind of the Christian version of Bridget Jones - "Theodora's Diary" and "Dear Bob". I read Theodora's Diary on the train on the way home & it's very very silly but an entertaining read! I also picked up a Rowan Williams' book "Why study the past?" which I thought looked interesting. Ah, the bliss of being able to find interesting books to read & knowing I'll have time to read them now the dissertation is finished!

Greenbelt is very big on fair trade and organic type stuff so there were some excellent stalls with all sort of things on that I normally only see in catalogues. I bought a People Tree top from a stall called Arkadash - they were really friendly and you could take stuff over to the loos to try on and then bring it back, without a deposit! There was also a large bead tent for people making jewellery etc, but I picked up some beads for stitch markers, including some groovy fishy ones:

Anyway, the dissertation is now printed. Tomorrow it will be bound and I'm going to London to hand it in & visit Loop! Hurray!!