I have a recurring nightmare that I’m trapped in a portable loo at Glastonbury. The harder I rattle the door, the more it refuses to budge. According to my dream interpreter, this means I am “lucky” and should “avoid doing reckless things”. But I think it’s just because, in 2010, I was trapped in a portable loo at Glastonbury.
It was only for a minute, but a minute thinking you’re trapped in a lavatory at Glastonbury is the longest minute anyone can ever live. Particularly when it’s the fourth and ripest day of the festival.
When it’s time to book my tickets, I always assume I love festivals. I’ve had some amazing experiences at them, man. I even got engaged at one. It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment, “14 pints of cider and I want to spend the rest of my life with you” thing. I took a diamond ring. I dragged her to the top of a hill. She moaned all the way up because she was missing some band. It was romantic. But the point is, I got engaged at a festival. So I must love festivals.
When friends say, “Shall we go to a festival?” I say, “Brilliant idea.” Because I love them so much.
But I’ve forgotten one thing: I don’t love festivals. What I love is camping with friends. What I don’t love is everything else. When I was younger, I didn’t care about the loos, or the hairy mud, or the heatstroke, or the miles and miles of walking, or the ravers falling on your tent at 4am, 5am and 6am, or the vomitous horror of trying to pack up and drive home at the end of it.
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Now I do.
I used to look forward to a festival. I’d plan what to see and when. Now I worry. For weeks, tent-location anxiety builds. At the Big Chill one year, I thought I’d found a perfect spot in a nice corner, away from the dance tent, upwind of the lavatories, next to some nice families who all signed my binding contractual agreements to keep their children silent in the morning.
Two days in, when those portable loos became medically unviable, our quiet corner became the urinal. On the third day, I bought a gas mask from the fancy dress shop. On the fourth day, I made everyone relocate. It took six hours.
Last year, we took the kids to a festival. I know. I have seen the entrenched Bugaboo babies pleading for mercy at Glastonbury, and I have known that their parents were fools. But Forgotten Fields billed itself as “small” and “family friendly”. There would be a family camping area. It would be lovely. We packed a six-ton bell tent and enough provisions to survive the apocalypse. I spent most of the first and last day trekking the 98 miles back and forth from the high-altitude car park to the low-altitude family area. Which wasn’t a family area anyway. Not unless that large group of teenagers were orphans from Utah.
I won’t take kids to a festival again. I won’t take myself. But it’s the start of the next season and a friend has just suggested we all go. And I love festivals, so I’ll see you there. Damn.
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Another thing I’m too old for is Bunyadi, London’s first, and last, naked restaurant, which opens this summer. Horrifically, it is a “pop-up” concept in which diners will be “enveloped in a Pangea-like world, free from phones, electric lights and even clothing”. Take clingfilm for the logs you’ll be sitting on and, if it’s a first date, avoid the chef’s special. If it’s your mum’s birthday lunch, I’d stick with Prezzo.
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Skimpy. Leggy. Hourglass. Risqué. Enjoying a workout. Hits the beach just two months after giving birth ... Aaarrgghh. This week, I have been surfing many celebrity websites. And, for the good of humanity/sanity, I would like all the above words and phrases expunged from the internet forthwith. Along with “spills into”, “spills out of” and “magic knickers”. And “steamy”. And “how does she do it?” Because she doesn’t. Someone else does it for her.
