I check the time. It's 20:44. I sprint back from the toilets. If I don’t make it back within one minute, my friends will leave the rendezvous and disappear into the crowd for Pulp. This is what we agreed: make the 15-minute meeting slot, outside the record shop tent, or get left behind.
It could easily be a scene from 1992. But it is 2026, and I am at a music festival. There is no phone signal.
This is deliberate. End of the Road’s founder Simon Taffe told me in an interview last year: “I love the fact you can’t really get reception. We could pay a little bit extra to get better reception, but I haven’t bothered.”
It means that, for four days in the borderlands between Dorset and Wiltshire, thousands of festival-goers are caught in a throwback experiment, where phones cannot be relied upon for constant contact.