Week 25 & Week 26 – Wednesday 22nd June – Sunday 26th June – Glastonbury Festival – Worthy Farm, Pilton - £200
A Brief(ish) Introduction
“Home Bargains. Bang! And it’s a bargain!”
We’ve finally reached that landmark stage in the Gigaweek calendar. The half-way mark. It’s been an emotional 6 months, full of the four L’s: Lager, love, laughs, and lager. And strawberry cider. The centrepiece of our challenge, Glastonbury, is an especially special way to end the first half of the year. As anyone with intimate knowledge of the rules of Gigaweek knows (i.e. no-one), as Glastonbury spreads itself out nicely over several days it covers two weeks’ worth of gigs, with Week 25 covered by the Thursday and Friday of the festival, while the festivities of the Saturday and Sunday cover Week 26.
Considering this year’s ticket alone cost us each two hundred quid, it’s comfortably our most expensive ‘gig’ of the year, which creates a high level of expectation. Having been to Glastonbury twice before, but no other music festival (excluding Sŵn and Camden Crawl), I’m perfectly qualified to declare that it is comfortably the finest festival in the world, easily eclipsing the many hundred festivals that I’ve never been to. Of course, I’ve read about at least three of those others, and asked people I trust about at least two more, so I know my stuff.
It doesn’t take a festival veteran to know that Glastonbury is huge. Of course size is relative, which is good because my relatives are enormous, but even by festival standards it’s a big ’un. Around a hundred and fifty thousand people pile in for a few days to turn a thousand or so acre farm into a temporary city, and yet remarkably, there are bigger festivals. But are there any that are more famous? The British Pie Festival perhaps. While I’m all for pointless arguments, it seems especially pointless to spend too much time arguing about whether or not Glastonbury is the best festival in the world. Let it be sufficient to simply say that Glastonbury is wonderful. It is also the best festival in the world.
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Sandro and I were grateful for the company of some familiar faces, including the ugly mush of P. Mushy, the heavily pregnant K-May, who was still commendably enthusiastic in spite of her terrible affliction, and the dynamic duo of Little P and Kimbo Slice. For the second year running we travelled to the festival site on the Tuesday evening, when the car parks were opened, before the opening of the main site on the Wednesday morning.
Sandro and I are both forbidden from driving (apparently you need a license) so it was up to Salazar Senna to take to the wheel, and she left the others trailing in our wake. After some interesting navigation, our convoy was joined en route at a carefully chosen meeting spot, by the world’s favourite cousin, Cousin Bish, and the amazing Barlow, who’d been let out by Ken and Deirdre to make his first appearance in the world of Gigaweek.
Arriving at night, the site itself was a sight to behold, as hundreds of lights guided us in. Cousin Bish and Barlow shared a toast of a ceremonial Scotch egg and we settled down for a few quiet car park cans with thousands of others present, while the stewards wandered among us, keen to share their stories of the five or six dead bodies found each year in discarded tents at the end of the festival. Meanwhile, P. Mushy showed off his giant purple lighter (it’s not what you’re thinking), one of his many purchases from his favourite store, Home Bargains. “You get top brands, at bottom prices. It’s truly full of bargains: for the home! In short, it’s a bargain!”
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If you’ve never slept in the front seat of a car, I highly recommend it. It’s a little bit like sleeping in a bed, except your body is less horizontal, and your eyes are more open. After a few hours of blissful sleeping, P. Mushy came knocking at five thirty to raise us, and ask us what the situation was. Queues had already formed, full of weary yet eager people with an appetite for queuing, turned on by sexy rumours that the gates would be opening earlier than scheduled. Kinky.
At around eight o’clock, the unthinkable, became the thinkable, and it started to rain. Why hadn’t the festival organisers raised a roof over the site yet like those clever people at Wimbledon? Why can’t the British government control the weather like those nice people in The Truman Show? And why was Sandro lying naked in the mud? All these questions flashed through my mind as I trudged over a helpless, naked, mud covered man.
The showers continued until we reached our camping destination, Park Home Ground, at around ten o’clock, and raced to erect a gazebo. I remembered my trusty motto, Go To Sleep, Someone Else’ll Do It, and left the hard work to the likes of Barlow, who connects poles at startling speed, and K-May, who, being pregnant, really needs the exercise. Thankfully it stopped raining while all this hard graft was being done, but the damage had been done and even I couldn’t sleep on the muddy, wet ground. Once our tent was up though, I was out for the count.
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After a pleasant six hour sleep, I was disappointed to find that while I’d been sleeping it had been raining consistently. I was even more disappointed to see that Flapjack had turned up. Fortunately he was accompanied by his friend The Wiggler, another who was gracing Gigaweek with his presence for the first time. Also arriving a little later was Sal’s German friend T-Reez, who’d made a critical mistake, by wearing lederhosen with her wellies. The final member of our party would later arrive on Friday evening in spectacular fashion, but more on Candy later on.
Those of us present at that point weren’t discouraged by the weather, and we headed to the popular Brothers Bar near the West Holts stage, where we met some Jamie Carragher loving scousers, who seemed to be everywhere, and naturally shared our best Cilla Black and Ringo impressions. More importantly, encouraged by a keen K-May we played a traditional game of ‘Butt the Beer’, an intelligent and highly sophisticated drinking game that involves head-butting a can of beer, lager, cider, or beans if you’re really daring, until the can bursts, at which point you are obliged to drink the remaining contents. Last year Sandro, P. Mushy, Cousin Bish, Barlow and I had played the ‘Doubles’ variant of the game, which involves putting your forehead on the line and having a lot of faith in the smashing ability of the man next to you.
On that occasion, my head had proved a delightful meeting point for the can, and a carefully aimed smash from Barlow, who was of course careful not to injure me in the process (the player’s wellbeing is paramount in ‘Butt the Beer’), saw a Carlsberg explode on impact. It was Little P who suffered most at the hands of Barlow this year as he took no mercy on her skull, and even the pregnant K-May couldn't escape his clutches. I didn’t need to rely on Barlow’s biceps however, and destroyed a can single headedly, celebrating wildly as onlookers rightly applauded, before Sandro helpfully pointed out that, as I hadn’t then downed the remainder of the can, I had therefore lost and achieved nothing.
Distraught, and having lost my only remaining brain cell, I went to bed.
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