Festival-Going for Dummies

A year ago, my friend Daisy and I intrepidly set off for our first ever festival. Our adventures that weekend were many and varied. Here are a few of the highlights…

We started the weekend exuberant and entirely undaunted by our hideous lack of preparation (we had borrowed a brand-new tent that neither of us knew how to put up, and thought that packing plastic beakers made us smug camping geniuses).

Somewhere up the M6, however, we started to doubt the extent of our camping prowess. Or rather, we began to panic that we were going to be crap at dealing with multiple consecutive hangovers without duvets and fish finger sandwiches.

As if to confirm our naivety, upon arrival at the camp-site we found ourselves surrounded by people unloading thousands of cases of lager. Rather dolefully, we surveyed our own sensible camping provisions: 3 small-looking bottles of Strongbow, bananas, maltloaf and a packet of Sport biscuits (nothing chocolate-covered; it could potentially melt and spoil). It looked like we were off on a smuggler-catching expedition with the Famous Five.

And so, in the interest of saving you any festival-related faux pas, here are a few things you probably don’t want to do:

·         Don’t take a trolley that’s blatantly designed to work only on flat man-made surfaces. It will give up and collapse at the least suggestion of a hill. You will then attempt to fix it with a Kirby grip, which will undoubtedly fail, and then you’ll be stuck carrying the bastard thing in addition to all your other stuff.

·         Don’t do drugs, kids. But if you do, at least try and be cool about it. Our friend brought along a couple of pre-rolled joints for the weekend, took one look at the sniffer dog at the ticket-barrier and freaked right out. It took a panic phone-call to her boyfriend, where he calmly explained that we were far too middle-class to get into any serious trouble, before we dared go any further. And God bless the knobheads with a wheelie-bin full of something much more illicit which sent the sniffer dog completely berserk, thus enabling us to swan casually past.

·         Don’t get as far as the actual camping-area, only to realise you can’t bag a suitable spot for your tent, given that you’ve never put it up before and have no idea how much surface area it requires.

At this point, Daisy and I were fairly close to losing it. What on earth did we think we were doing? We were completely clueless camping morons. We were going to die out here, huddled and shelterless in the dark. Either that, or we were going to stab each other to death with tent-pegs within 30 minutes. No, no, I exaggerate. In true British fashion, we sat down, took deep breaths, and had an emergency picnic to calm down. It consisted of decidedly non-cool cous-cous, satay chicken and a baguette.

By the time we had finished we were much more relaxed. And more importantly, our friends Claire and Laura (much more au fait with tents) had turned up and taken charge, laying out groundsheets and acquiring a Cath Kidston flowery mallet within seconds of arriving. Excellent.

Within the hour, tents were up, sunscreen had been applied and cider cracked open. And as it turned out, we were total naturals at the whole festival thing.

Well, almost. There was a strange moment the next morning when, elated at surviving our first night, Daisy and I somehow found ourselves sitting in an Alpro Soya-sponsored ball-pool fashioned to look like a cereal bowl, bewildered yet obedient, shouting the words ‘Plant Goodness’ to a hidden camera in order to receive some free granola. Weird.

By Saturday night, we were drinking cider in a field, branded with temporary tattoos depicting anchors and Hula girls. We were wearing mental false-eyelashes as our contribution to Fancy Dress (the theme was something about animals and machines, but who the hell cares). We were listening to live music, played by a man with a hat and a beard, in a tent that looked like a library. We had enthusiastically and unreservedly located our collective festival-going mojos.

By the end of the weekend, we were experts in creating the illusion of having showered, using only dry shampoo and baby wipes. We had made some friends (the man who had a hat EXACTLY like Claire’s, the dude in the tent near ours who lent Daisy some Lurpak for her Soreen).

I do not doubt that even a slight shower would have broken my spirit irrevocably. But we had hot, sunshiney weather for 3 whole days. Which allowed us to lie around saying wanky hippyish things about Nature, and finding ourselves, and realising what Life is really all about.

So by all means, and at least once in your life, do it; go, be free, be a festival-goer. It’s great.

And at all costs, take plastic beakers. They make excellent vessels for mixing Cider & Black, and they come in really handy for brushing your teeth.