It’s A Funny Old World: Jane Wenham-Jones
‘I love music – but the thought of attending a festival brings me out in hives’
They’re back. Mud-streaked and battle-scarred. With tales of surviving the flash floods and heatwaves, the collapsed tents and flooded Portaloos. Sunburnt, semi-delirious and urging me to go next year.
‘God it was fantastic, darling,’ says my friend Janice, reliving her week in Glastonbury with her partner and daughter. ‘You’d love it,’ she adds.
No, I absolutely wouldn’t. I love music, but the thought of attending a festival brings me out in hives.
Maybe if you’re one of the celebs with your en-suite Winnebago parked up in the VIP area and lackeys on hand to proffer Champagne, it might all be jolly good fun. But why would us mortals want to wallow in the mire with 150,000 other unwashed bodies, before squashing into a sweaty tent pitched near Portaloos? Where is the pleasure in walking half a mile to a far-flung stage, up to your knees in sludge with rain running down your back or roasting to a delicate shade of lobster in a field with no shade?
Spending hours bumper to bumper to get there does nothing for me. Nor does the vision of an evening jammed in traffic trying to leave the place.
Of course, I know I am out of tune here. The middle-aged now apparently flock to the 500-plus festivals organised in the UK each year in their droves. Many take their kids, too. A friend’s gleeful account of holding her three-year-old grandson over a hole in a plank beneath which there was a bottomless pit of something unspeakable made me shudder to my core.
I carry lavender oil to smear beneath my nostrils (a tip from a veteran festival-goer) in case I have to venture into a dodgy public convenience – even those with hand dryers and hot running water.
Yes, yes, I know it is all about the atmosphere, of the happy-clappy, gloriously dilettante escapism, of the throb of the beat and the haze of incense hanging on the sweet air, but I can quite honestly say I’d rather watch it on TV.
The only time I enjoyed a music festival was when I overlooked one from a balcony while staying in Gibraltar and could listen to the strains of Duran Duran and Kings of Leon with a rug on my knees and a large gin and tonic!
I can see that the appeal could lie in feeling young again, free and unfettered, leaving behind your cares while you stand in a line for an hour to get a dodgy burger listening to a pop group last seen in public circa 1989 – but the lack of facilities wouldn’t swing it for me.
When I want to relive my youth, I trot along to Broadstairs Folk Week, about a mile from my house, when the town is packed with hairy folkers with their pewter pots and every bar hosts performers from lunch till dusk. There I can happily sit on a pub floor, drinking cider, in hippy garb, listening to the busking until the early hours.
The main draw being that within 20 minutes I can be tucked up under my own duvet with a cup of green tea and the shipping forecast on Radio 4. And, if I wake up at
3am, there’ll be nobody queuing for the bathroom.