Glastonbury and learning how to embrace the mud
Imagine someone asks you to pay them around £200 to spend five days in a tent surrounded by muddy fields and around 200 000 hungry, sleep-deprived and often very drunk people. Would you do it? I might not have, but when I wired my money to Michel Eavis a couple of months ago I had now idea what I was in for. Which was probably for the best.
Not even on the Wednesday before we set off with nicely packed clothes, heavy tents, food, first aid stuff and enough rum to supply a team of thirsty sailors did I really know what to expect. I was in a pretty good mood. This was an adventure and I tend to like adventures, the safe, nice kind that I can control and preferably escape from if I feel the need to. So there I was feeling pretty good about life even though the air conditioning wasn't working in the bus and it took us hours to crawl along tiny Somerset roads. We were part of a strange kind of expedition. Hundreds of thousands of people escaping to a temporary refugee camp... just to listen to some music and unwind. We eventually got off the bus and ended up in ankle deep mud and the mud never went away after that. I never really learned how to embrace the mud. It was everywhere and impossible to get rid of. We were wading through it. It stuck to our boots and made us walk around with heavy lumpy clay around our feet. It got even stickier at night and our boots got sucked into ankle deep piles of it. It was in the tent, on our clothes, in our food, under my fingernails. There were huge wet puddles of it outside the loos. No matter how hard you tried not to contaminate any clean stuff with it, the mud just got in everywhere. At one point I felt a strong urge just to lie down in it, it's not like it would have made matters any worse. The mud made me exhausted. Now I'm not really too fond of physical exertion in the first place, I should also add that I also don't particularly like camping and the few times I've done it in the past I've been overcome by waves of unexplained moodiness where all I can think about is someone airlifting me back into civilisation and a nice warm bed. Mainly I can't see the point of it all, why make it difficult, when it could be so easy. But then why go to Glastonbury in the first place. This was a question I kept asking myself after we got off the bus. Suddenly we were wading through this slushy mud, standing in a line for what felt like two hours and then trekking all over the campsite with our equipment trying to find somewhere to camp. Eventually we found a spot, threw down our bags, furiously started setting up the tents (well, those who knew how to do it did, I did my best trying to "help" hold the tent erect). After that I sat down on the ground and started calculating how much it would cost me to call a minicab and get it to drive me home. The only thing that stopped me was the thought of walking back to the entrance of the campsite with all my equipment. I felt like an angry eight-year-old. The festival was against me, it all just really sucked, I was cold, hungry and shattered, I hated it, hated it, hated it. I wanted to go home. Buuu. Then I had some tea and Gerry came to the rescue with some gentle soothing. And I realised I wasn't alone. Everyone else had dragged way more equipment through the mud than me and the guys had put the tent up, made food and no one had complained. No matter how I much I wanted to sit in a corner of the tent and glare angrily at everyone, I was could also just decide to have fun instead. This positive thinking led us to trek all over the campsite on Thursday. Which in hindsight might have been a bit optimistic. Especially since the mud made every journey last twice as long and twice as difficult. I felt especially annoyed after I spilt half a bottle of water in my bag and instead of watching Hobo with a Shotgun in the cinema tent we ended up sitting through the first five minutes of anti nuclear propaganda that insisted on showing image after image of terror attacks from around the world. It wasn't exactly uplifting. I did have a shower in the afternoon though, which was great. And things started to get better. When the festival actually began on Friday it all made a bit more sense. There were bands to see. This was why we were all here! It was raining, but huddling together in a crowd made the cold a bit easier to manage. BB King came on stage and played blues that made my tummy go all warm. I started getting more and more giddy about finally being able to see Morrissey after having spent the last ten years listening to the Smiths everytime life felt a bit stressful. Morrissey didn't seem to enjoy it though and was telling the audience off for only wanting to see U2. He did play uberclassics like This Charming Man and There is a Light, which I guess is good for now. There were many high points after that. New discovery The Gaslight Anthem and then Pulp on Saturday, sitting on the hill looking over the campsite, dancing at Arcadia, accepting the mud, really enjoying the taste of instant noodles, getting juice from the juice bar, getting to know new people. I was feeling pretty proud of it all, I was surviving, I was enjoying myself, I was completely switched off from the outside world. No email, no phone, just Glastonbury and the sole aim of getting through another day. Waking up on Sunday morning to the sounds of someone puking outside our tent was definitely one of the low points, but then again it seems to be a pretty cliche festival experience. I wont miss the sticky mud or the rain or the awful, awful tiredness. I will miss the bands and the fun and the strange sense of pride after having come out on the other side happier and a bit more alive.
