World Of Magical Awesome Delights

Last weekend, Mark and I went to WOMAD with my brother. It took us about six hours to get there since the south west chose that day to flood some more. Half the site was flooded by the time we arrived and the rest was at least ankle-deep in mud. The programme was in complete chaos with almost all stages running late, some by over an hour, and some artists not performing at all. It took about 15 minutes to wade from A to B through the mud, except on those occasions where you got stuck in a particularly nasty spot (the soil was clay and so by Saturday evening resembled quicksand) and managed to heave your foot free only to find you'd left your welly behind and were flailing around desperately on one leg trying not to topple over into the mud. Admittedly this only happened to me once, but really I feel once was enough. By the end of the weekend the mud was so sticky that once you'd made it to a stage, further movement was restricted to the Stuck Dance (Mark: "Everybody pivot!") I have rarely been muddier. And it was absolutely fucking awesome.

My main recommendations for this year, should anyone be interested, are Mariza - a Portuguese fado singer with a staggeringly incredible voice; Lila Downs - a funky Mexican singer who is my new favourite lady; Samba Mapangala & Orchestre Virunga - an East African band who make you feel like dancing is really what life is all about; Guo Yue - one of the world's most awesome flute players; and the Imagined Village - a project which reimagines English folk music, released in September.

Apart from this lot, my festival highlight was probably Young Zulu Warriors, an incredible group of South African kids, mostly AIDS orphans. While we were waiting outside the Little Big Top for them to come on, a tractor came ploughing through the mud pulling a trailer behind it and, as it stopped outside the tent, we heard this amazing a capella Zulu harmony singing coming out of the trailer. Couple of minutes later the choir bounced out of it into the tent and carried on singing and dancing - it was so infectious the crowd was totally in the moment. Having not been to the Little Big Top before it took me a minute or so to realise that not only were they not on the stage, the stage was still being set up and their set wouldn't actually officially start for another five or ten minutes. They were utterly irrepressible and it was magic.

The moral of this story is that WOMAD is absurdly ace and the God of Farce and Calamity which follows me around, much to his irritation no doubt, cannot prevent it from being ace no matter what he throws at it.