The TWUNTs set off at 7am on an auspiciously sunny day, some of them notably bleary eyed from the sensible early night they should have got the night before. Everyone was very relieved when the last straggling TWUNTs made it onto the celebrity tour bus, but understood the ordeals that Charlie faced in the two minute walk she’d had to make from home to coach. With 25 TWUNTs and various ‘crew’ on board (including the probation officer, legal advisor, holistic nutritionist and off-shore tax avoidance strategist) the TWUNTs were officially on tour.

The trip passed peacefully, only broken by the occasional snoring TWUNT. As a new festival, CarFest was an unknown, nobody had any expectations of what would meet us at the gate…  Still, one can feel fairly confident in suggesting that as the tour bus grew closer the TWUNTs were fairly impressed by the *huge* scale of the festival… the endless fields of tents… a stage bigger than all of our egos combined… a happily waving Chris Evans driving past in a car.

After getting in the artists’ entrance (tee-hee), playing it super cool with the artist liaison people (ahem) and definitely not getting over excited and playing with the festival buggies, we were given our ‘Artist – Main Stage’ wristbands and shown to our dressing room, the sign to which disabused us of our previous belief in the spelling of ‘ukulele’.

The Tunbridge Wells Ukele Night Thing members were then left with a few hours to prepare themselves physically and mentally in any way they saw fit. Luckily the beer tents opened fairly early, so it was apparent that this feat would be easily accomplished. In addition to the TWUNT’s musings upon beer tents (my next poem) people made various expeditions around this site, highlights of which included six-deep crowds watching tractors dancing to the Pet Shop Boys; the sheer size of the arena and stage becoming more obvious; a ‘name that poo’ competition and; some shiny cars or whatnot.

Having completed their tours the TWUNTs regrouped for the rehearsal and sound check, though not before Pudsey bear got a bit star struck and demanded that we be photographed with him. It’s a price you have to pay. The rehearsal went well, in that the TWUNTs fell to absolute pieces because they were entirely distracted by a spectacular display of planes doing loop the loops overhead.

Climbing the stairs to the stage for the sound check made everything go from feeling real, to feeling horribly, stupidly real (definitely not trying to get a ‘reel to real’ reference here). After milling around, trying to look confident, and putting the all-important chairs in place we were asked to sing and play to get our sound levels correct and we benignly agreed to do so.  However, with this technicality out of the way, most of the sound check involved the TWUNTs training numerous cameras at the crowd to ensure that the best possible view of their performance was recorded. Once this task was completed they duly TWUNTed off the stage.

Waiting backstage before the performance TWUNT excitement had been ramped up to 11 and various small groups could be spotted dancing and singing to ‘Soul Sister’ in preparation, that song has never garnered so much enthusiasm from so many TWUNTs.