Issue 41 / 2012
THE GUESTLIST NETWORK 15 www.guestlist.net 7
FESTIVAL FEVER On offer at the great British festival: rain, mud, no sleep, sunburn and cider.
What is it about festivals that everyone finds so great? Don't get me wrong, I love them. Good mu- sic, great friends, unlimited booze, what more could you want? Well, for starters, maybe slightly better hygiene standards. Is that too much to ask? After three days of nothing but a pack of baby wipes to keep you clean, you begin to feel more than slightly grimy. In fact, grimy doesn't cover it. You've begun to crust up like a six day old Warburton's and your wellies have welded themselves onto your feet and you're beginning to worry about the increas- ingly likely fact that they're never going to come off.
You'll have to quit your job in the city and become an actual farmer just so you don't look out of place. Sickening thought, isn't it?
By the Sunday this is the least of your worries. By now everything's gone downhill, your hand-eye coordination, the number of portaloos which pass your, sufficiently lowered, hygiene standards, and your conviction regarding the precise location of your tent. There comes a moment, probably some- time on that Monday morning when you're keeled over your desk at work because your prick of a boss
refused to give you the day off, when you think to yourself, maybe you could've just watched it on telly. Maybe you didn't have to have drunk so much, and maybe, just maybe, festivals are evil.
By the following Friday however, these feelings are gone and you remember that weekend as noth- ing other than the greatest weekend of your life, excluding the previous year which was also pretty damn good. You've forgotten about that moment when your mate had to find an empty bottle ASAP, unable to escape from a crowd of 40,000+ people,
and that incident resulting in you having to get 30 stitches in the medical tent at four AM. Then, be- fore you know it, next year's tickets have gone on sale and you click Buy Now without even so much as a thought as to the insanity of spending another 200 quid to stand in a field full of rank smelling, hairy arm-pitted hippies, getting rained on and vi- sually assaulted by naked drunk people. What, you haven't been to a festival? You haven't lived mate!
