Bittersweet end of a festival

It’s sad when it comes to the end of a festival. Snoozing on the bus home feeling tired but relaxed and happy. The worries of the world trickle back into my mushy-pea brain as we re-enter the city. 

‘You love this city, and this is your home’, I tell myself, but I can’t help noticing the haggard stressed people who jostle about in the public transport system like flies trapped in a jar. The festival atmosphere was all carefree and fun-loving, wild. 

A woman I didn’t know with a lovely Welsh accent told me over a beer that the end of a festival is bittersweet because she knows it can’t go on forever. ‘Here, everyone’s got glitter on their face and it’s our own little world. When you get back home you see all these people in suits looking serious and you realise God that’s what the real world’s like. Bit of a shock to the system.’

On my way back I see a woman giving grief to a lone TfL worker about delayed trains. ‘It took me over an hour to get here and it was supposed to take 20 minutes. What’s the use of spending millions on this new line if it doesn’t work?’ The staff shakes his head in an ‘I’m not getting into an argument over this’, sort of way and lopes back into the office leaving the woman fuming on the platform. 

I look up at the sign and it reads Next train in 4 mins. At a festival 4 minutes is nothing. You wouldn’t be able to get to the toilet in 4 mins. You might head over to a big tent where the next band you want to hear is playing in about 20 minutes and kill time waiting for their set drinking a beer with your mates. 

Time is wide-open at a festival. 

It took me about 30 hours to accept this fate and embrace it.

Because in the first 30 hours of a festival you have to deal with relieving yourself over a toilet seat suspended over an eco-compost bog, which uses sawdust to cover everyone’s excrement. It stinks. It’s terrifying in the dark when you’re drunk because you worry about falling in or vomiting. I overheard a child in the cubicle next to mine whining to her designated adult, ‘OK. Don’t look down!’ like she was at the precipice of a rollercoaster. 

You soon get used to decanting alcoholic beverages into small plastic bottles which you carry on your persons at all times so that you can have a tipple whenever you want. By the end I was gladly supping shaken-up red wine from a PET bottle because it saved me queuing and spending money at the bar. Although the selection of ales at Green Man were next to none.

You’ve got to get on board with the fact that there’s no bed at the end of the day – only a roll mat in a tent – the thin sides of which shake you awake under fierce winds or make you sweat when the sun comes out because you’re sleeping inside a large waterproof bag. You fetch your own water to brush your teeth in a damp field. Your food staples are bananas and cheese strings. 

All these experiences help set the bar lower than the standard of living I'm used to and as a result made me care less about everything (!) including a lack of phone signal or having any concrete plans. You simply sway to music in the lush green countryside, then scamper over to another bit of a field to watch more musicians banging out their beats, etc. 

Festivals relax you and make you focus on the fun and funny side of things – like, when I was tired and yawning, I woke myself up by falling flat in the mud. Some strangers came over to help me up and said, 'You still look amazing!' which was nice of them. Anyway, I became wide awake in time for the evening entertainment.

Being in Bannau Brycheiniog listening to live music with friends was the best feeling ever. What more could I really want? There was delicious beer on tap and the food was surprisingly good like shakshuka, triple fried chips, Goan fish curries, and so on. 

I spoke to strangers, or they spoke to me. 

In the morning after the torrential rain, I was on the hunt for wellies because I had only bought trainers with me, so went to the festival store to ask the people at the desk. The store worker flashed a quick grimace and shook her head, ‘No I’m afraid we don’t sell them, and I don’t think anywhere in Green Man does, sorry.’ 

A bare-chested bloke standing behind me with blonde hair flecked with mud said, ‘I’ve been doing the rounds all morning looking for a place that sells wellies. This here was my last stop. If there were somewhere that sold boots today, they’d be making a killing.’ 

We trudged back to our own tents accepting our fate of trench foot, but the weather was so much better than yesterday – also the sun had come out –  and today’s line-up was the best one yet, so I wasn’t going to let it hamper my spirits. 

Tanabata 七夕

I celebrated Tanabata at home in South London, with my new housemates.

This is a traditional Japanese summer festival which is connected to the stars. Legend goes that there is a weaver and a cowherd up in the Heavens who fall in love. But because they fall in love so deeply, they abandon their duties. The sacred silk stops being woven and the cattle wander all over the place. The god who oversees Heaven is pretty angry, so he splits the lovers apart by the Milky Way. Now, only once a year on Tanabata are the couple allowed to meet at the stellar river. To aid them, a flock of magpies appear to create a bridge for them to cross and meet.

It’s a pretty sweet story and has a relation to the stars in our actual galaxy: Altair and Vega. These are part of the summer triangle, which are the brightest stars you can see in the northern hemisphere at this time of year. When the two stars become brightest it means that it is the height of summer, and if you are able to look at them during a dark night sky – in between Vega (the brightest of the two stars and the weaver) and Altair (cowherd) you can distinguish the Milky Way.

On Tanabata, one of the things we do is write wishes on colourful strips of paper called tanzaku, then hang them from a bamboo tree. Here is the emoji to prove it 🎋 You can wish for anything really, like passing your driving test or world peace. Whatever you want. I made somen noodles for dinner, which are thin and white and symbolise the Milky Way, while Simon fried tempura. The best combination is the crunchy fried-ness of the vegetables, dipped in the light noodle broth.

I told Obaachan about me celebrating Tanabata with friends in London. She told me that when she was a girl, she remembers her father going out on Tanabata to gather very long reeds from the river. He would sit on their front porch and wind the reeds around each other. She remembers he would weave out of the reeds two horses, then face them towards each other and bind them together with bamboo. On Tanabata he would release the two horses on to the river for them to be carried away by the water.

‘Why did he do that?’ I asked.

Obaachan makes a hmmmm sort of noise, as if both recalling and trying to work it out.

‘I wonder? It was probably something to do with the region.’ She grins, ‘They were really good horses though.’

The old man in the second-hand bookshop

The man in the bookshop waits for me. I assume he does, a little bit in his heart every day.

When you come up from London to Edinburgh you notice how nice life could be. When it’s sunny it’s even more striking. Better dogs, more frequent snatches of conversation and shared nods and alrights. And here in Edinburgh you get called ‘pal’ in tempered tones of aggression always, and it feels nice. Manageable. Friendly without overdoing it. Not wanky.

I passed Greyfriar’s Bobby with his metallic snub nose, all naked and shiny from being over-rubbed. I got crisps with my sandwich instead of salad, because eating out means not having to be healthy and enjoying life. I pass a charity shop every five hundred meters filled with cardigans and desks (and one cat in the window) and it makes me happy. Edinburgh has to be one of the most pleasant cities to live in. But likely if I said that to someone in passing they’d condescend the comment like a Londoner with ‘If you can afford it’ but then again maybe they’re all just capitalising and hitching up the prices threefold whilst the Festival’s on. I would. Because the southerners coming up here with their selfie-sticks and lack of self-awareness think coffee is worth £4.50 so serve it to them for that.

There is one second-hand bookshop with its shelves immaculately ordered in to categories: modern drama, crime, classical drama, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, American literature, history, ancient history and gardening. Everything really. I asked the white-haired man in the light-blue short-sleeved shirt, ‘Do you have any books by Jonathan Coe?’ because I had finished one of his stranger novels on the train ride up and I was totally intrigued.

The bookshop owner had in fact approached me whilst I was in the fiction section looking up authors’ surnames, I was in section C already and he had just caught me in the nick of time to lend me a helping hand right when I needed it. Good intervention. He seemed glad I knew what I was looking for; so he could actually be helpful I predict because you must get nonsensical requests working in a book store, as we all remember from Notting Hill and Dylan Moran’s acting part.

‘You're in the right place,’ he said with a smile that said I’m proud of you for knowing your alphabet and index systems ‘let me have a look for you.’ He bends down and searches the spines with his index finger.

‘Anything will do’ I say trying to be helpful, but of course I do want that specific author so not anything.

‘Nothing on the shelf.’ He says with not a slump in mood but a wistfulness.

‘Sorry. Coe comes in a lot but we don’t seem to have him in stock.’ He seems amused by it, like he should know where the author was hiding in the book store but has lost all recollection of where he saw him last.

‘That’s absolutely fine.’ I say.

I’m more pleased to have met the old man than to have found this book. I won’t tell him that because that’s too much feeling from a customer I presume. It’s sunny outside and I will keep welling up with feeling whilst my romance with this city lasts (two more days at the most).

The next day and the next day, and the next few days after that, I pass his second-hand bookshop and I see it every time but daren’t go in.

Not out of fear or awkwardness as such, I am not sure why, maybe because I like the illusion of the story I am playing in my head every time I walk past and see in the shop window display not one but two Jonathan Coe books staring at me from behind the glass. I don’t even pause infront of the window incase he sees me and waves at me to come in, or points at the two books with his friendly face and warm heart.

I should just go in.

It would probably make his day.

But what if I did.

And he didn’t remember who I was.

What if he went to all that trouble.

To find those books and put them out.

But what if they’d been out in the window all along.

And he had forgot.

What if they are meaningless.

And the books don’t mean a thing.

That's why I’ll leave it.

Yes much nicer to leave it.

Because I like the story better.

Than ever finding out the truth.

  

 

Primavera Sound Porto (playlist)

Listen via Soundcloud to my Primavera Sound Porto playlist

With my arm bound in poly-thaaine (Withnail fans bow in adoration) I am aware I have not yet done my packing nor got any Euros out or checked my train journeys to the airport. Again I loll about in a lull of time listening to tracks that flicker because of our super-slow broadband connection and the light outside my window only exists because of pollution. Off to a beach town. Off to a port. My arm is wrapped in cling film because I burnt it on the frying pan flipping courgettes. I wonder what will happen when I wake up.

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Shove the bacon buttie in my face and absorb it instantly.

Things I will not miss about the Fringe are: the wet drips which fall from the grim underside of that bridge in Cowgate, the stairs (that are everywhere), and flyers.

Hungover days and the restless nights that come with drinking too much, and then the Scottish fried goods and the endless walking over from New to Old parts of town. It never stopped not even in the downpours or in the early morning, stuff just kept going on.

Lurching down steep steps, which I’d only just clambered up half an hour ago to collect some pants I’d left in the print storage room (spare pants - because I’m always prepared - or because I forgot that I’d left my pants in a back room of a venue and thought before catching the train “outta here” that I should probably collect them).

Sweating. Ski jacket. Prepared for all-weather but not for all this weather meaning the sunshine we’ve been getting. In Scotland? I know right.

But the upside of all this traipsing by a banister is, or, were the shows. I managed to see a heck of a lot of good shows. So here’s some I remember the most jotted down for you:

Le Gateau Chcocolat who is a big black beautiful opera singer told an achingly honest tale of a young man who grapples with depression, being gay and being black. The lighting design was the lighting design to beat all others. His voice is ridiculously amazing.

The show which dedicated it’s heart and soul to the artist and wife of Beatle, Yoko Ono, titled appropriately Oh No! by Jamie Wood was brimming with creative nurture. The most enticing bit was when Jamie curated some Bagism on stage and invited a member of the audience to get in a bag with him and get completely naked. The minutes of silence that ensued after this innocent plea was met with awkwardness until a fly lad of 23 got up, crossed the stage and entered the bag/blanket with him; they both followed to get completely butt-naked beneath the sheet and then continued to talk about whether said young lad had ever fallen in love before, and what it means to love a person. Performance art + comedy = happy fun.

LetLuce in Sea Men (A Naval Tale) was a hilarious and sometimes trippy ride in to the world of two clown-character comics who’s unfurling narrative about a fish who wants to go clubbing on River Island and a pirate captain who wants to drink the Potion of the Ocean (said in an elongated Brummie accent) was just the bomb. The nuts. Mighty Boosh would have taken their hats off to the pair.

The stand-up that I enjoyed the most was Liam Williams with his second stand-up hour: Bonfire Night. A pretty neat and of course, damnably clever hour to follow up his last show (Capitalism). Lots of self-hating and millennial naval-gazing, you just have to laugh or else you’d cry.


They’re my picks and in hindsight, I did have a good time and managed to tone my arse from all the stairs and got a surprising tan out of the outdoor flyering ordeal so, all’s well that ends well.