There’s been something happening over the last 20 years, the summer circuit offering such rich experiences. Over the years I’ve been part of many healing areas which have fallen into a ‘way of being’ that supports a different impulse. And that is why I’m so very proud of what End of the Road Festival has acheived and why i call it the ‘gold standard’.

In being invited, year on year, to curate the team for the Healing Garden we have been able to build a community. From that first year in 2006 when the garden wasn’t opened until Saturday morning due to Health and Safety checks, when we played football, gave each other treatments and prayed it was all going to work out. When the garden gates opened I took my massage chair out to the crowd waiting for the next band on the Garden Stage, drumming up interest. The years of growth, each year more stages, more guests, how the ‘village’ has welcomed many new faces. And last year, someone emailing me to say ‘you helped me get through the weekend’ due to Long Covid symptoms, and remembering the year after the ‘fallow year’ and how we’d missed the garden, the being there, the people we saw and that sense of renewing our community.

So this is a way of saying Thank You – to all those who made those early years worth the wait to celebrate 20 years at Larmer Tree Gardens, pitching our tents and sometimes performing miracles. From airbed fail saves, disco dancing injury repairs, hangover hugs and not being able to hear each other at different ends of couch when it’s really kicking off on the Garden stage. Thank you. Thank you for showing up. Thank you for putting your faith in our abilities. And thank you for all the years of laughter and love.