...but to get back to why we feel down after a festival; certainly for me there's an element of too many late nights and too much abuse of the old liver (Micca's collection of hip-flasks are legendary) - but largely because these sort of gatherings are pretty emotional events.
A lot of people at Towersey are people I've known for some years, but who I only really know through festivals (the 'usual suspects' in some cases - particularly from the Middle Bar at Sidmouth).
With most friends, you meet up, chat, catch up or whatever, but with friends at festivals you do something far more intimate and far more emotionally powerful in that you make music together; something which transcends mere friendship and makes them almost family.
I don't know what it's like in the USA and further afield, but I've seen grizzled, gruff grown-ups (men as well as women!) in bits during particularly good sessions. Whenever people say the Brits are an uptight bunch, I think "Bollocks - just go to a festival and see what singers are like".
Sometimes something - a resonance, a scrap of sentiment in the lyric or just a sense of the potentially awesome power and beauty of the human voice when raisze together in song - just seems to hit the spot, and you look around to see an awful lot of handkerchieves and coughing and spluttering around you.
The important thing, though, is that you have to participate to tap into that feeling (something that Dick G has mentioned in his first homecoming posting).
If you simply sit and listen, I don't think you connect, in the Forsterean sense, and therefore the homecoming isn't such a wrench.
My own theory (which could be total cobblers, but what the heck) is that singing is one of those things that releases the endorphins and natural opiates in the system like little else. In other words, if you've had a really good festival, you've dosed yourself with some pretty powerful drugs (as well as the fermented variety, of course) - ergo, post festival, you've got to go cold-turkey, and the better the festival, the blacker the dog that awaits you at home.
Or, in the case of a friend of mine, you can just bounce on to the next festival - she started at Sidmouth, then did Whitby, Pontardawe AND Towersey (don't you envy academics their long summer breaks?). But that's a bit like avoiding hangovers by staying pissed!