The only festivals I have been to before are the Reading Festival and Benicassim in Spain. Glasto compares well to both of these: Reading because the average age at Glasto is over 18 so not everyone is on a mission of mindless destruction while still happy to have a drunkenly good time. It’s better than Beni because the average temperature is pleasantly under 30 degrees, allowing for some sleep during the daylight hours, although the admittedly infrequent rain torrents that were dropped from the sky definitely weren’t nicer than the sometimes oppressive Spanish sun.
We left for Somerset early on the Wednesday morning fully loaded with camping gear and what we believed to be enough alcohol to last several festivals (but actually only enough to get Freeman pissed until Friday evening; we had to ration it after we realised quite how quickly it was going down). I had the roofrack on the car, with the rucksacks held down in a highly professional manner, with elastic bungees and an old curtain I found to stop it all flying off the car while crawling along the M4.
We had nearly reached the village of Pilton by midday, with Freeman prophetically claiming that “we did really well with the traffic”, before hitting a queue of post office proportions. It took another 90 minutes to get into the car park by which time Freeman had taken the wheel and the burden of the Peugeot’s supposed ‘new’ clutch. Bushell had spent the whole trip on the back seat trying to realign his body clock, having been woken at the ungodly hour of 8am.
Once parked, we lugged the gear to a camping spot we felt was pleasant enough for us and cracked open a couple of beers and chilled until bedtime. James arrived later on (about 2am), having spent something like 15 hours on the coach from Leicester. I had been asleep for a few hours by this stage and awoke for a quick wee (which is generally encouraged to be undertaken in the toilets, not freely on the grass, unlike Reading) and to welcome him, before going back to sleep.
I don’t remember a lot about Thursday apart from going to the toilet only to hear that Michael Jackson was dead (not that it stopped me urinating) from some girl who clearly wasn’t a fan. Not the greatest thing that could’ve happened, it encouraged Bush’s stupid friends to text him weak jokes about it that he relayed to us until he lost interest, which happened quite quickly.
The music began on Friday, when everything starts blending into one and it requires a cursory glance at the lineup for me to recall who I saw that day and the rest of the weekend. From memory I saw mainly bands whose lineup doesn’t match that of their peak (The Blockheads without the dead Ian Dury) or bands who’ve been riding the same hits for 30+ years (Status Quo, Madness etc). That’s not to say they weren’t good fun though, I could dance along to Baggy Trousers forever, it just doesn’t seem quite right that they should be 50 year old men singing about getting up to mischief at school.
Before Fleet Foxes, Freeman went to the campsite to collect his box of pear wine, to quench his thirst while seeing the band. When we met him at the Pyramid Stage for the Specials, he was drunk as a skunk, incoherent and utterly unresponsive to our statements (so what’s new). During one of the band’s many bouncy two-tone ska songs, he started nodding off. I left him, in the laziest possible way, with Bushell. This, and the resulting hassle in waking him up for Animal Collective, led us to ration the dwindling supplies of beer.
I’ve never been that bothered about drinking during shows. I find dulling the senses also dulls the experience so getting pissed watching music or comedy doesn’t really do it for me. Because of this, the late finish of the bands and my inherent tiredness at festivals I only got drunk once at Glastonbury. It’s difficult to start drinking at 1am and get a really good buzz going before nodding off. I thought I’d fight this on the Friday night by having 3 Pro Plus tablets. Within 10 minutes of popping them I had fallen asleep.
This wasn’t quite the most irrational thing to happen in our campsite over the course of the weekend, though. James ‘Beer Noodles’ Ellison wins those particular prizes. As well as eating toothpaste with the aid of his finger because he forgot to take his toothbrush, he wore Tesco bags on his feet for use in the substantial Glastonbury mud having forgotten his wellies. He also convinced himself that, after drinking a total of 4 pints between 2 and 11pm, he was legitimately drunk when he saw Franz Ferdinand headline the Other Stage. Luckily for him, he behaved pretty oddly at all times so it was difficult to determine how pissed he was at any one time.
I went to the Cabaret/Comedy tent on the Sunday and realised all-too-late that I could’ve spent the entire weekend in there. We only stayed for Robin Ince but I could quite happily have spent three days sat in there watching every act. It would’ve been a lot better for my back than standing for 4 hours while waiting for and eventually seeing Bruce Springsteen and, for me, arguably better entertainment. I expect I shall return next year and I have vowed to spend more time going to the comedy when I have nothing to do, rather than wasting my time reading the Guardian at the campsite.
We left mid-afternoon on the Monday, generally fed up and looking forward to returning home despite the whole festival seeming to have happened in a matter of minutes. The drive back was done with a gritted fatigue, a deja-vu-ey, eye twitchy sort of tiredness that can only be caused by genuine exhaustion and weakness. This was probably the sort of limit past after which my body just gives in to any illness that may be in the air. In this case, swine flu was in the air.
Getting worse before I got better, I spent 2 or 3 days in bed, my haziness testament to quite how much I slept and how poor I felt. I only got up to expel mucus or a bright yellow syrup that would’ve been urine had I not been incredibly dehydrated. I got myself on Tamiflu and the whole thing passed in about a week, about the same length of time as I spent at Glasto, but felt like considerably more.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment