THIRTY-six hours afterwards, I am still on a high - 100 per cent natural, if anyone's asking - after my first Electric Picnic, writes Frank McNally
No doubt the festival's hardcore fans will claim it has lost its way recently and that the early stuff was better. As for me, I used to wonder if its more enthusiastic reviews were chemically induced. But I take it all back now.
Apart from anything else, the event is the most staggering feat of organisation I have ever witnessed. Time was, circuses could claim to be the greatest show on earth. In the era of the boutique music festival, however, the ante has been seriously upped.
I'm nearly sure there was a circus at the Electric Picnic. Certainly there was a giant tent with "Fossetts" written on it. I even meant to drop in at one point. Unfortunately it had to compete with a multiplicity of other sideshows, all of them interesting.
You couldn't stroll anywhere on the site without suffering attention deficit disorder. It was like being a nine-year-old in an outdoor version of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. So I never made the circus.
The competition for eyes and ears was fierce even in the relatively subdued surroundings of the "Spoken Word" village. Here you had such civilised offerings as an Arts Council-sponsored tent in which musicians talked about their favourite books. There was also a poetry tent. And there was the "Salon du Chat" - a food-free restaurant in which customers chose from a menu of conversation topics (typical main course: "David McWilliams: Enemy of the State") before tucking in with complete strangers.
Not only did such events run the risk of coinciding with the louder bands on stage elsewhere. But some of the spoken events were a lot noisier than others. Thus Josh Ritter might be discussing his admiration for At Swim-Two-Birds to the accompaniment of blood-curdling screams next door, as the open-air theatre hosted yet another mass slaughter in the condensed version of the complete works of Shakespeare.
Maybe festivals like these were created for a generation with short attention spans. On the other hand, the act of queuing for toilets - something most people had to do several times at the weekend - required epic feats of focus and patience. When you got there, sometimes, you also needed Zen-like powers of concentration, to pretend you were somewhere else.
Yes, they could have done with more Portaloos, which would minimise the risk of you having to use one after somebody who was apparently on the dirty protest. But that's the problem with music festivals. No matter how good they are, if you're unlucky, visiting the toilet can leave you with the most enduring memories.
Against this, festivals also provide unlimited opportunities for at least one of the genders to fulfil its deep-seated need to urinate in public. It must be a primal urge for men to mark territory in this way. At any rate, by the end of each evening in Stradbally, wherever there was a fence, a wall, a tree, or any landmark, there would be men marking it.
Curiously, one of the few art forms unrepresented at the weekend was mime (I'm not complaining - honestly). My guess is that at previous festivals, people who stood still in the same place for any period were urinated on. When they dismantle the fences after the event, there must be a complex crop-circle-type pattern etched into the grounds. Perhaps space aliens are puzzling over its meaning even as we speak.
There was general agreement among regulars that this year's music line-up was mediocre. I was very relieved to hear it. It would have been even more worrying if all these bands I'd never heard of before were really good. But there was near consensus too that the line-up's shortcomings didn't matter, because the event has transcended mere music.
I know some people who hardly left the comedy tent all weekend. In fact, alone of all the big tops, this seemed to be permanently full. Once the new rock-and-roll, comedy now appears to be the new religion. I tried to go see Maeve Higgins on Sunday and it was like Mass in the 1970s: you couldn't get within 15 feet of the door.
The only thing missing from the festival (apart from mime artists) were teenagers - or at least those aged 13 to 17. Officially you have to be 18 or older to buy a ticket, but the family-friendly policy welcomes accompanied children aged 12 or under. So adolescents alone are banned, even if accompanied by their parents and a medical certificate promising good behaviour.
There is a certain poignancy here, in that this sub-species of humanity - and the hormonal disturbances for which it is famous - have been at the heart of popular music for 50 years.
And yet I met nobody who thought the ban was a bad idea. Teenagers have Oxegen to go to, was the general view. Besides which, their absence was considered essential to the atmosphere of love, peace, and understanding that permeated the site: enveloping everyone from Candi Staton (aged 65 and her voice still gorgeous) to toddlers asleep in their mothers' arms.
Even so, I was glad that the many veteran or reunited bands playing at the Picnic did not include my old favourites, the Undertones. Otherwise they would have had to perform their immortal hit, Teenage Kicks,: thereby causing the crowd to sing along.
And in the circumstances, it would have been a bit rich.