RICHARD BELL has a bittersweet night taking in the sounds of Equitruck 4 at Oxford’s Jericho Tavern...

FIRST things first – tomorrow is Valentine’s Day night, and as everyone under 80 knows, the best place to find ‘lurve’ is on the dance floor.

So there – that’s it, my Valentine’s contribution. Dance, and the world dances with you; prop up the bar and watch as others pull the talent...

And now, as they say, for something completely different.

Every summer there are a couple of months referred to by music fans as festival season, a time in which not a weekend goes by without an enormous amount of people converging on one muddy field to stand in the sun and share live performances by their favourite bands with their closest friends.

Oxford is very lucky to host Truck Festival, one of the very best that the country has to offer. Since 1998 Truck has been the shining jewel in Oxford’s musical crown, and with all proceeds going to charity, it is also a considerable weight in setting Oxford’s moral compass back in the right direction.

You may be wondering why I’m banging on about a festival that happens in late July, especially in a week that has seen more snow than a Siberian winter.

Well, those rather wonderful people who run Truck had the brilliant notion of bringing that festival feeling and that Truck experience to our doorstep, well away from the festival season itself.

Equitruck is so named because it was conceived to fall equidistant between the last Truck and the next, and serves both as a chance to showcase some outstanding local talent and to give us all a little taste of that festival feeling.

The organisers chose the perfect venue to ensure that the bitterly cold weather was as little a problem as possible. The Jericho Tavern was packed with huge groups of old friends, brought together by this event which acts as a catalyst for both the nostalgia and conviviality that comes hand in hand with being with loved ones you simply don’t see enough of.

The heated smoking garden provided the ideal environment for people to chain smoke in the way in which you can only get away with at a festival, and that glorious music room played host to the main attraction of festivals everywhere - the music itself.

Festivals are all about excess and this is no different. As the night wore on, people sank deeper into the delirium of happy inebriation, with gales of laughter playing like melodies over the crunching and crashing of the best bands Oxford has to offer, continually sweeping people out of any kind of stupor they would at any other type of event inevitably fall into.

The faces of Radiohead, Supergrass and, rather bizarrely, John Peel (who I wasn’t aware had anything to do with the Jericho Tavern) gazed down upon the room as the night came to a close, and I can’t quite help but feel that the whole event is tinged ever so slightly with sadness.

Equitruck has managed to capture everything I love about going to a festival, but has reminded me that I won’t be able to feel that way again for months.

On the evidence of this evening, this year’s Truck Festival is going to be magnificent; I just can’t wait that long for it.