Electric Picnic is for all ages...and the pair of us are the living, limping proof

Great news: on the day before Electric Picnic, I managed to remove the insoles from my Doc Martens which meant, for the first time, I could fit my orthotics into them. I had imagined I’d have to bring my orthopaedic disco runners to the festival, but they are white and glittery and, given the mud-bath weather forecast, would never have recovered. I share the news with The Best Friend, who can only fit the heel lifts she needs for her dodgy Achilles tendons into an equally unstable pair of runners. Also, she’s worried because damp weather almost always gives her a chest infection and, since she’s sharing a tent with me, she’s quite concerned about the Vesuvius-sized haemorrhoid in my bum. I mention all this to another friend who remarks that far from attending a festival, what we really need is a weekend’s respite.

Are you ever too old for Electric Picnic? Are you ever too old to tumble into a tent and wonder if your pillow is just damp or technically wet? To get notifications on your phone that the purple skull MDMA is extremely strong and to go easy on it? To let pretty girls you’ve only just met stick tiny sparkling gemstones around your eyes? To wade through mud and wash it off in flimsy showers you’ve queued for outdoors for half an hour in your pyjamas? To drink it all in and dance it all out again?

We were already on the shady side of youth when we went to our first Picnic. The Best Friend and I, we’d have been there from the start if it hadn’t been for those pesky kids. But back in 2004, when the first festival twinkled into life, we had six children under 10 between us, and since we weren’t the kind of parents who have the patience to make macaroni pictures in Little Picnic while one of their favourite bands bosses the main stage, we didn’t go.

Now, five of those six children are at Picnic and the one who isn’t is performing at a music festival in Madrid. That’s Her Small Boy, for the record, while My Small Girl is playing right here, on the fourth biggest stage — which will only sound impressive if you’ve actually been to Electric Picnic and encountered its gazillion different performance spaces. And if our earlier attendances at the festival had the Best Friend and I in that bracket of “Picnic is for all ages and here’s the living, limping proof” now, after two fallow years for the Stradbally estate and all who partied in her, we are bordering on marvellous.

Across the whole weekend, young people queue up to congratulate us on being there — being still alive, basically — in much the same way as RTÉ used to like making documentaries about the lovely octogenarian owner of Castle Leslie who liked to go to raves. We look around us and, apart from a bunch of veteran pirates from Cobh singing acapella on the Salty Dog stage, we really don’t see anyone older.

Even our own kids’ attitudes towards us have undergone a subtle shift. As they started coming to the festival, in increments, our encounters with them on the huge site were usually accidental and generally fleeting.

Now, they suggest meeting up many times over the weekend, making sure we’re having a good time, that our tents are ok. When my son — her godson — thinks the BF might fade, he warns me not to be on my own, to let him know where I am. When her son — my godson — thinks we won’t make it to Rankins Wood in time for The Scratch, he catches both our hands and ushers us in the side of the tent like we’re a special case.

Of course we’d love to be them. Of course we’d love if our faces weren’t the most wrinkled ones staring back from the mirrors over the basins where everyone brushes their teeth. But with great age comes some financial stability and when the rain comes bucketing down, we at least have the consolation of a proper, posh tent that is only a little bit damp, while The BF’s daughter wakes up in a puddle and The Boy’s tent literally dissolves. And our queue for tea and coffee isn’t nearly as long as theirs — but is long enough for me to pester strangers into coming to see my daughter play on the fourth biggest stage at EP.

When we’re pestering strangers to come see our grandchildren play, maybe that’s when we’ll be too old for Electric Picnic. In the meantime, like Old Man River, we’ll just keep rolling along.