Electric Picnic: When young and aged collide

[ Read all the news as it happened live on day two ]

Festivals aren’t what they used to be. That’s the message coming from the fascinating History Ireland Hedge School discussion at Mindfield when I drop in. From the audience, activist and writer Eamonn McCann laments the “tendency of the ruling class to take over festivals”.

He recalls a festival of yore at which BP Fallon warned the crowd about undercover drug detectives and declared “Fuck you, copper” from the stage.

He’d like a return to the “Fuck you, copper” attitude, he says. Outside, the rain batters down.

A man called Ben Sowden uses a sander to remove some graffiti – the name “Dobs” – spray-painted in black on the wall of the 3 Live platform, usually the home of heavily branded festival fun.

“I turned up this morning and saw this,” says Sowden, “and I went, ‘you little . . .’ ”

He refrains from using a swear word, then he resumes sanding away Dobs’s handiwork. It’s a rare outbreak of unendorsed anarchy.

At festivals nowadays, graffiti is harnessed and funnelled and encouraged.

In the Body & Soul section I meet an artist called Niall O’Lochlainn spray- painting a backdrop for some spoken-word performers, and there are other boards nearby on to which regular civilians daub their own high-minded messages.

These include: “Always remember these are the good old days” (wise) and “Only dead men see the end of war – Plato” (I didn’t know Plato was here) and “#Dix out 4 Harambe” (touching).

'Old person zoo'

At the Jerry Fish Tent, 30 hungover, partially face-painted, blissed-out people are led through some sort of ritual dancing by two glittery young women with radio microphones.

“Now walk around and make eye contact,” one says, and everyone mingles through dance.

“What’s going on?” I whisper to a girl in a poncho. “I haven’t a breeze,” she says cheerily. Her name is Susan Brown.

“We decided we had no choice,” says her friend Catherine McKenna. This is how the Blueshirts started.

Michael Flavin, a tall man with a smear of muck on his face, is getting very into it. His friends move on but he decides to stay.

“It’s very soulful like,” he says. People have their own ways of recovering from the night before. I like to watch woodcarving at the Greencrafts Village.

I meet Chris Warburton who is expertly carving a huge, fat squirrel out of wood. “It’s a red squirrel,” she says, designed for children to clamber over. I want to know its name.

It doesn’t have a name, she says, which disturbs me a little. It’s very calming in the Greencrafts.

“What do young partying twentysomethings make of all this?” I ask. “They never make it over here,” says Warburton.

It really feels like there are several distinct festivals here this year.

The babies are at one festival with their ear-protectors and urchin-like pursuit of refundable beer glasses (this is a thing).

The middle-aged people are at another, with their stubborn refusal to let go of youth culture (these are often teamed with the hipster babies). Then there are “the young”.

Tim Kiely is wearing a T-shirt with “This is my Pulling Shirt” written on it and his friend Dan is wearing a zipped-up anorak. While sitting on ground so wet it might as well be a puddle, they tell me about The 1975 (who played on Friday).

I tell them about the actual year 1975 and the high-brow discussions at Mindfield. “I’ve never heard of [Mindfield],” says Dan.

Later I bump into Tim and Dan again. They have, in the meantime, discovered Mindfield. “There are all these small tents with different kinds of old people in them,” says Tim.

“It’s kind of like an old person zoo,” concludes Dan.

Impressive Bill

I tire of “the young”. Instead I watch a middle-aged man called Bill fall from a bench.

He catches his burger in mid-air with one hand and lands on his other elbow in a sort of glamour-shot pose. It’s a noteworthy display of drunken grace.

“Do you want to get up?” says his friend, Sheila. “Ah, I’m grand here,” says Bill, opting to stay on the wet ground eating his burger.

“That was impressive,” I say. “He’s a very impressive man,” says Sheila, but then she sighs, as though Bill isn’t an impressive man at all. “Could you pass me down some chips?” says Bill. I think Bill is a very impressive man.