1) Bo Diddley. I'm so glad I got to see him last year at the Byron Bay Bluesfest. Hey! Bo Diddley!

2) YSL. "Fashion expresses social change" said one of the commentators on my radio. It seems that his contribution was the pants suit. Which is great because when I was a teenager I used to have to buy jeans in the men's department, which was fine for me, but I remember a huge fight with mum over when and where it was OK to wear them. That's really funny because I haven't seen her wearing a skirt for decades now!

3) Somebody had the bright idea of sending the Bill Henson photos to the Film and Television Classification Board, something that has never been done before with still photos. The FTCB came up with a G classification (for general exhibition). The police are nothing if not dogged though; their investigation will continue.

I didn't take many pics at the actual festival. It was usually either too dark or too wet. These were taken during a couple of brief, rainless, late afternoon interludes.

I've had a fantastic week off. I set out on Wednesday afternoon to drive up to Byron for the Bluesfest, stayed overnight in Kempsey (basic motel next to McDonalds and KFC) and arrived on Thursday to meet my aunt and cousins who had rented a flat in Byron for the holiday. So I spent the next few days going to the Bluesfest in between eating, drinking and visiting local highlights with the cousins. They have utterly different tastes from me - I tagged along while they went shopping for clothes (I did buy some rubber shoes against the mud); we visited a resort called Gaia because it is owned by Olivia Newton-John - though none of the cousins knew the meaning of Gaia and, judging by the spa etc at the resort, neither does ON-J; we went to an extraordinary place called Crystal Castle - guess what, it's full of crystals, as well as tarot readings, astrological stuff, buddhist, hindu and chinese statues, and also had a fabulous exhibition of 'wearable art'; and we had coffee at a stunning 5-star-type resort called The Byron at Byron (spa, tai chi and yoga available).

Blues is very loosely defined at this particular festival: the main attractions for me were Bo Diddley, Taj Mahal and Eric Burdon and the Animals (3 of the original group), but I discovered some new (for me) goodies including Rodriguez, Fat Freddy's Drop and Bonnie Raitt. I was really disappointed by Paul Kelly - I expected political stuff, but he sang romantic rubbish - and the one everyone was raving about, Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals, was way too reggae for my taste. Besides, I nearly died from heat and claustrophobia in there. I also saw Missy Higgins and The Waifs and a French-Pacific Islander group called The Sunshiners who were, well, sunshiny. But none of the latter could really be called Blues. They had four stages all going concurrently, one of them under the biggest tent I've ever seen. I worked out that the big tent was for young people and the second biggest was for grey power. In the latter, a man kept announcing that it was illegal to smoke inside the tent, but the stuff they were smoking was illegal anyway - the air was thick with it. It rained almost constantly and I came out of it covered in mud - well that part was like Woodstock I guess. It was fun. Bo Diddley is a living legend and he knows it!

I took two days to drive home. The first day I went to Nimbin - a village devoted entirely, since about 1970, to organic food and marijuana. At the Nimbin museum a man offered me something to smoke, and the whole place looked like it had been put together by somebody completely stoned (I'd done a lot of passive smoking at Bluesfest anyway). Stayed at Coffs Harbour that night and drove home via Bellingen and Dorrigo - a spur of the moment sidetrack because the Bellinger River looked nice and I once read Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda.

There will be photos.

Update: Nimbin Mardi Grass. This makes fun reading too