I’ve just been imagining sitting on the grass outside the Amphis Stage at Wysing in the early afternoon sunshine listening to some catchy tunes. The festival main stage definitely takes a turn for the serious later in the evening but the Amphis stage will provide danceable stuff right up until the end. During the early part of the day there’ll be bands playing really great songs. Like London-based artist Morgan Quaintance’s band Plugs (click on the bold text to be taken to Youtube or Soundcloud pages), Cambridge based Forest, some gentle melancholia  from German artist and musician Manuela Barczewski, alongside compelling ambiance from another Cambridge based band Hollow Mountain. There is so much great stuff this year! Buy tickets from here or via the Wysing website. This photo is from inside the Amphis Stage a couple of years ago - it's a magical place to hear music and yes that man in the yellow t-shirt in the audience is Tommy Grace from Django Django!

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I've had a bit of a busy couple of weeks so haven't got around to doing more music festival blogging but definitely will soon. Alongside hosting business events and being here over our annual Open Weekend, one of the big things I have been doing is planning for a visit by the new Chair of Arts Council England, Sir Peter Bazalgette. He has been travelling around the country checking out various arts organisations and I was asked to host and chair a lunch for visual arts people from the region. Obviously we all wanted him to go away feeling confident that good things were happening in the East and I think we got the message across. Though I think he was probably impressed by the lunch more than anything! I asked The Grantchester Pottery to provide lunch and Giles did the most amazing job. Of course we ate off Grantchester Pottery plates that were made in our ceramics studio, surrounded by Grantchester Pottery light fixings and screens, but Giles Round is the most amazing chef and pulled together a truly delicious lunch. In amongst all the briefing sessions about the ACE visit, Giles had me ordering goats cheese from Wobbly Bottom Farm in Hitchin and bread baked to order by Peter Voshell, who ran our recent bread-making workshop. It has been a bit of a mad week, but getting back to normal now, just about.

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All my life I felt I was missing something, left out of a conversation. I felt things talk behind my back – flowers for example, and streetlamps – and the feeling of being followed from a distance. I wanted psychic powers: I got an online guide to telepathy. ‘Objects speak but you haven’t learned to listen’ is something the guide said.This intense attention to the self is a masked attempt to escape it, you catch these things happening as if by accident, as if concentrating on something, so they don’t feel you listening. After a while they’ll want to talk. After a while they’ll need to. These whales on TV for instance…I like the way they make me feel, like an ant looking out of an aeroplane window. I am an ant looking out of a plane window. Hi there, it’s great to finally meet you! So far the guide was interesting, encouraged I continued to the first exercise. Hi there! Please picture clearly an object in your mind and I’ll describe it. You imagined a banana – you imagined a jar of honey – you imagined a fish – you imagined a fish on a rainbow. I see you. Hi there! Hi there.

Poet Sam Riviere's text in Luke Abbott's video for Brazil.

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