I have to say that I was a little concerned when I heard that Secret Garden Party hadn’t sold out its ticket allocation this year and that they were reducing the budget on some of the attractions as a result. But I really shouldn’t have worried. A huge amount of time, money and effort has gone into landscaping the eastern portion of the site with sculpted turf banks surrounding a new circular swimming pond, the Oddball Dancehall stage, and a relocated Feast of Fools, among other things. The Collisillium was larger and more impressive than ever and also changed location to make better use of the previously rather sparsely populated areas of the site.

Bearded Kitten had a big new area to play with, including the Powder Room gay bar and Asstrology venues, as well as the usual suicide games and the bizarrely macabre “Dank Parish”. And down by the lake a new “Yacht Club” appeared together with the “Labyrinth”, which meandered along the stream before opening out into another and slightly more chilled outdoor venue. The Saturday night fireworks show was as spellbinding as ever and the shipwreck engulfing kraken was easily the most impressive centrepiece installation I’ve seen in the middle of the lake.

SGP is never really about the line up and to be perfectly honest I saw very little of the musical talent on offer, although I was very impressed by young upstarts The Strypes on Friday evening, who were followed by the equally fantastic Django Django. I’m afraid that, due to distance from the stage and some rather subdued lighting, I failed to get any decent photos of the latter. Likewise for Faithless on the Saturday although, slightly disappointingly, this actually only turned out to be a Sister Bliss DJ set with Maxi Jazz doing a few vocals over their better known numbers rather than the full band.

The weather was much kinder than last year with predominantly sunny conditions throughout, although we did have a couple of hours of fairly persistent rain on the Saturday evening. But this dried up quickly enough to be no more than a short term and minor inconvenience and in any case a lot of attention has been paid to making sure that the areas that were worst affected last year had plenty of bark chippings and hardcore laid down in advance in order to prevent a repeat of the quagmires of 2012.

I should also make mention of the fact that the lengthy queues at the gates which have been such a painful experience in past years have been successfully addressed with very little queuing being reported by anybody I know. And the security have also notably improved from being downright hostile to positively friendly and helpful in the 4 years that I have been attending. In fact the only complaint that I heard about the organisation over the whole weekend was that the toilets could have done with cleaning a little more frequently.