Glastonbury, London, and squashed sugar bowls

My parents live about 6 miles from Glastonbury, where right now the festival is in full swing. I can hear the music - even from inside their house - like the noise of distant thunder. I wonder, what must it be like to live closer? Perhaps the locals relocate for the duration, like families I know of in Notting Hill who decamp during Carnival; what seemed a selling point when they moved, young, free and single, into their cool west London pads rapidly turning into a living nightmare when they found themselves trapped inside their home with buggies and young children for 3 straight days at the end of August every year.

Sure, it's cool to visit Carnival, but to live through it with no respite from the partying? Those who could voted with their feet and went to visit gran and grandad for the weekend, or better yet, took the children to their doting grandparents before hotfooting back to London, safe in the knowledge that little Lucinda could sleep through the night whilst mum and dad recaptured some of their lost youth...

I haven't been at Glastonbury, though. Arriving last week, we brought the Boys down Somerset (no worries they would be kept awake by the dull thud thud thud of the bass after 3 days spent with family looking to cram 6 months-worth of treats in 72 hours exhausted them utterly), and then Husband and I travelled back to London. I went to CyberMummy11 yesterday before I spent the evening celebrating a friend's wedding and then, finding myself with an hour to spare before heading back to green space, wandered around the Summer Exhibition at The Royal Academy this morning.

Here then are some of the things I learned this weekend...

15 flattened silver sugar bowls, suspended in a line 4"above the floor on fine wires, make a rather more beautiful exhibit than you might imagine.

I can still - after 20 years of living there - get lost in London trying to find a tube station in the City.

This is not a good move when you've been wearing your strappy wedges all day.

Always take an umbrella when you go out in London, even if the sky is cloudless when you leave. Either that, or a hair dryer. If you forget both, then resign yourself to rats-tail hair.

Even the best restaurants can give you a little 'extra' with your salad. A little 'extra' that wriggles unobtrusively on your plate, that is...

CyberMummy is a great place to go for inspiration and impetus to finally get around to all those things you've been meaning to do for ages- either blogging, or writing-wise -but haven't yet got round to.

It's also a great place to meet all those people who's blogs you admire, and some who's blogs you haven't yet got around to checking out but have been meaning to do for ages...

But you still won't have the time to properly catch up with most of the people you want to talk to.

And that there were some drinkers in the bar of a certain hotel on The Strand who got rather more information than they bargained for, when they listened in to a group of 10 bloggers swapping stories on Friday night.