Just move your belly a little bit to the left,” says artist Katie Sarra to her client, loading her brush with a thick dollop of pinkish paint. Her client is Baz, also known as Baz Lightning. On his 32nd birthday he was struck by lightning which melted the gold chain around his neck. A scar runs down his torso, tracing the path of the bolt as it leapt towards the metal key in his pocket, leaving his body wasted.
A specialist in abstract erotic art, Katie is painting Baz’s body, which now resides permanently in a wheelchair. Her curtained studio is set up in Pleasure Island, a large tent in the disabled field at Glastonbury. Run by the charity Outsiders, which campaigns for the acceptance of disabled people as sexual partners, the tent houses a masseur, reflexologist, yoga practitioner, make-up artist and a hairstylist, all of whom provide respite from Glastonbury’s feral crowds.
It is not just the disabled who are well catered for now. Along with the carloads of middle-class families and their Thule car-roof boxes is a cross-section of the British public, many of whose only brush with counterculture is a weekly trip to the recycling bins. Gone are the travellers’ vans, the CND logos, the cesspits and hedgerow shits, ousted are the scallies and their bags of magic mushrooms, the thieving yardies and motorcycle gangs lurking in the next field to yours. In little over ten years, British festival culture has transformed itself from a filthy, often fearsome, teenage rite of passage into a sanitised national pastime, as essential to the summer as Wimbledon or Goodwood.
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