Some idiot at Radio 1 (tell me, is it still on 275/285?) coined the phrase “Festival Dads” recently which caused me to think “I resemble that remark”.  Sharon and I went to Latitude this year, and took the little one with us, although our involvement in her “good time” extended to a daily meet up to hand over food and money.  I saw quite a few Festival Dads.  Festival Mums too, were much in evidence, as were a genre overlooked by that arrogant controller of Radio 1, “The Festival Grandparents”.   Of course, Latitude is different from say, Download or Reading, in that there are events going on that are of interest to all genres and ages.  The literature tent might as well have been renamed the Radio 4 tent, in effect – indeed, I had the pleasure of hearing a program on Radio 4 that was recorded at Latitude.

The bands, too, were cross genre, and cross age.   Many of the youngsters getting their first break by playing at the festival could have benefitted from dropping by Daryl Hall’s performance for a lesson in stagecraft, and musicality in general, though.   The bravery of Lloyd Cole, who performed a set with his son – the very definition of a Festival Dad, if you like – was rewarded with an appreciative audience, the majority of whom were there to see him, rather than shelter from the rain, as seemed to be the case with many other acts.

I’m digressing.  This is supposed to be a guide for the over 50’s and how to negotiate some of the pitfalls you may find should you decide to embark on the fun packed adventure that is festival going.

Noise  

Well, we like a good sleep, so the essence of being fit and ready for the following day is to make sure of two things.  The first is that you choose a pitch in the ‘quiet’ corner.  Your admiration for the stamina of youth to do stupid things at three in the morning will be blunted if their tents are pitched near yours.  No, find the quiet corner – main gates, turn left.  You’ll spot the rest of the wise souls by the fact that they have tents that they can stand up in.  Pitch up there. You will not regret it.   The second thing is the equipment you buy.   The tent should, ideally, allow you to stand up.  As years go by, getting dressed on your knees is often a challenge to your flexibility and mobility.  No, a tent that you can stand up in is a must.

Mud

You can’t rehearse for this.  Nothing can prepare you for life in apocalyptic mud.  It could be the most sun-baked summer since 1976 – you’ll need wellies regardless.  I recommend a good make, a stout pair of green ones, possibly with ‘Dunlop’ on them somewhere.

Don’t try to get away with ankle length boots, you need proper down-on-the-farm wellies.

The mud will quickly spread throughout the site, and you will be left pondering how on earth soldiers in the Somme actually coped.  Have you ever seen the harrowing pictures of a horse trapped in the mud? A typical English summer shower, and the campsite inhabitants will be resembling that poor animal.

This was Thursday evening.  By Saturday evening this was impassable!  Amazingly, to the right of this picture, a number of youngsters had pitched their tent, which were completely covered in splashmarks and mud.  Still, they were close to the entrance, I suppose. Perhaps they were social animals. Or perhaps just animals, I don’t know.

Now, I hate to sink to a level that suggests toilet humour, but needs must….

Latrines

The facilities on the camp site – well, there is nothing humorous in these, at all whatsoever.  If the Elizabethans had been transported through time, and landed in a 2012 festival, they would have been appalled.  The phrase ‘festival toilet’ is a byword for medieval squalor.  If you are at all squeamish about your ablutions (perhaps you don’t like the close proximity of people when you need to go?), then this is going to be your worst nightmare.   How to describe…..well, the toilet blocks are approached via a quagmire, which is probably the most hygienic part of the process, as, hopefully, it is ‘pure’ mud.  The toilets (and I use the work advisedly) are on a raised gantry, 6ft in the air.  When you approach from the quagmire, you can see  nothing but metal half doors, and wellies at the bottom.   These are approached  by climbing up some metal stairs to a metal stall with the aforementioned door.   Inside is a metal bowl, around which is caked an eclectic mix of mud and fecal matter.  Trust me, you aren’t going to want to sit, so I recommend taking an Imodium on a daily basis no matter how bad it makes you feel.  No, all you can do is urinate, and frankly, that is fraught with danger, as you’ll be caught by the splash back.   Remember, all this is accomplished whilst wearing wellies, and every stall is continually occupied.  So, you need a new life skill, that of being able to point percy in the general direction of the bowl at the same time as holding your nose.  Finished? Somewhere amongst the caked filth on the floor, there is a pedal. Press it, and it sort of flushes in the manner of a drinking fountain.  Now, do yourself up (still holding your nose? Interesting how quickly you can learn new skills, isn’t it?), and exit the stalls.  Remember to take it easy on the stairs going down, as in your haste to exit this particular circle of hell, you may find yourself slipping.   Moving gingerly to what I consider to be the ultimate irony – you can avail yourself of a handwash, a sort of soap concoction that you acquire by pressing a button….which is covered in other people’s fecal matter. Still, at this point, you have emptied your bladder.  Reach into your pocket and fish out one of the handy baby-wipes you’ve packed for the occasion.  Back to the quagmire, my friends, back to the quagmire. I should point out that the latrines inside the actual festival are a hundred, a thousand times cleaner and more palatable than the campsite ones.  Of course, the main festival doesn’t open until 10/11am, so don’t count on that as a solution.

Tent

Well, this is your first festival – so you’ve done this your way, haven’t you? You’ve nipped to Halfords or Argos in the morning, and bought a tent.  This sir, is your first mistake, because you haven’t had time to put it up and test whether you can in fact live in it for 4 days.   I have more advice for you.  You are over 50, and you are perhaps a bit stiff in the morning.  You will need a tent that you can stand upright in.  You may have been able to dress yourself while bouncing around on an air-bed when you were 21, but you cannot do it reliably, or with any finesse now.  Remember, that the noise insulation afforded by bricks and mortar are no longer available to you, and the grunting and moaning and gasps of “oh for fsck’s sake” as you roll around what has become a bouncy castle of a mattress can be heard by your neighbours.   These neighbours are all seasoned festival go-ers and all of them have tents 6ft tall, and they bought all their possessions into the camp on a trolley.   They know you are a greenhorn, and best of all, you don’t realise that you are their floorshow.  They had you marked down as ‘entertainment’ the minute you erected your tent, and they were proved right the minute you started banging it tent pegs with shoes, and tripping over guy-ropes. So, go for something large, and don’t be afraid to take more territory than you believe is decent (a windbreak is ideal for making a land grab that would make Hitler himself nod with approval).  This is why you get there on a thursday afternoon, even if you had to queue from Sax-bloody-mundham.  It is time well spent.  While we are at it, let us discuss what else you need and why.   A blowup mattress with known air-retention properties.  You buy it a week before, blow it up and see how long it takes to deflate.  You can bring a hand pump, but invariably, the nozzle won’t fit, so you start the festival hyperventilating like a 4 year old at a birthday party and this is not good.  Share the load with your other half, and come back to it every say, half an hour.  You’ve got ages, there is nothing but some substandard orchestral nonsense on at the ‘lake arena’ anyway on a thursday.  Oh and doubtless some poetry.  See later, when I cover how to cope inside the arena.   In short, get the tallest fsck-off tent you can find, get some windbreaks and one of those gazebos.  I cannot stress how big the tent or the area you need to grab must be.  A quick phone call to Billy Smart’s liquidators might yield the kind of thing you really need.

Lebesraum

I mentioned the land grab, didn’t I? Well, position yourself in such a way that the windbreaks shield you from the main pathway (LED lights atop the posts for the windbreak make an ideal navigational aid) – and make sure you are as close to a main pathway as possible.  Not so close as to invite people to use the side of the tent as a byway, no.  The idea is that the windbreaks shield you from the mud splatter of the main path, protect your tent from drunken halfwits tripping over your guy-ropes and define it’s boundaries.  They also discourage latecomers pitching their tent in the 30cm space next to your tent.  No, these windbreaks are the picket fences of the camping world and I recommend them heartily enough.  Especially as some Saturday arrivals decided that it was fair game to pitch their tent abutting ours, and this caused a fair amount of consternation.  Still, they were from up north somewhere, so I expect they were just mirroring their own back-to-back and cobbled street or something.  That brings me on to a note of caution – Lattitude is marketed as a ‘middle class’ festival, but this doesn’t stop some frightful northern types thinking it is OK to turn up and well, re-enact the four yorkshiremen skit.  Endlessly.

Seating

All this is secondary to what is to become your new best friend – the fold up chair. Get one that is padded under the thigh, or you will end up with the back of your thighs looking like Flashman has decided to take out some of his frustration on you.  These are great things, and fold down into a cylindrical shape and fit in bags that can then be worn across your shoulder, quiver style, and imbue you with the illusion that you are being cool like Legolas in the Lord of the Rings.  Mine had an integral cup holder which made it ideal for settling down with a NCOT.  Except, there is NOWHERE that makes a NCOT, they all use that shite UHT smeg that masquerades as milk.  This brings me to…..

Nutrition

You have choices here, but in the end, to quote Rich Hall in his Kraft rant in the comedy tent, “It’s all shit”.  Latitude might be a delightfully peaceful middle class festival with little hippie children in tie-dye frocks frolicking around their parent’s picnic whilst nodding intelligently to the Alabama Shakes (Festival Dads and Mums universally liked and nodded at the Alabama Shakes.  “They were on Jools Holland a few weeks back, ya know…”), but I am afraid I have to disabuse you of the notion that there is anything worth eating from any of the outlets.  Everything is stodge,  noodles, rice, burgers – all flavourless carbohydrate laden nonsense, that made me want to scream.  Where was the olive bar? Where was the sushi? Whither a lightly grilled Halloumi on a bed of cous-cous?  Where was the nice crisp fresh salad that even McDonalds seem to manage these days?  Choose your path carefully, young man, for even the Kebab isn’t even what it seems.  I did have a kebab.  It wasn’t even like the Friday Night special that we are all used to, this meat looked the same, but was grey in colour, and tasted of something faintly herby.  It was vile.

Sharon acquired a box of noodles from one of the vendors one lunchtime, and handed it to me.   I swear it weighed the same as a bag of sugar, and the tasteless worm-fest inside the box had clearly been boiled for hours.  Caribbean pork? Delightful if you like your rice fried to oblivion and beyond and are fond of working out which part of a pig’s knee cartilage you might be tucking into.

The onsite supermarket is also not what it seems. You queue up to be permitted entry in a “no more than two children in the shop at  any time”-style.  The customer is always a thief and never in the right.  Plain demeaning, especially when you are eventually admitted to this holy grail of fresh food and wholesome goodness, you realise that it is just a teenage festival-go-er’s dream – £40 for 24 cans of weak nonsense cider/lager and £2.50 for a tube of pringles.  Waitrose, it assuredly is not.  The best meal I had?  Well, it was one of those John West Tuna pasta things that are pre-cooked and all you do is pull the lid off.  After the muck we had seen on offer, this was manna from heaven. You can of course, elect to cook in and around your tent.  I expect that is the answer.

I think from a culinary perspective, I’d like to know why festival food is of such a low standard, and why we put up with it. Perhaps next year I should go along and offer something like I’d like to eat and enjoy. A bubble and squeak stand, for example – the breakfast of champions.

What to do ‘inside’ the festival

Buy the overpriced programme (£10) and plan your strategy about where you want to be at any given time.  Resolve potential clashes early, and always exit the place you are about to move from 5 minutes early, lest you get swept up by everyone else flocking to see, oh, I don’t know – Jack Dee for example (Jack, by the way, likes the word f*ck.  A lot. He comes across as curmudgeonly as you or I which is his charm, I suppose, but he has a microphone, an audience, no censor, and a case of borderline Tourettes. It gets old, very quickly).  The comedy tent is always good for keeping dry – I nearly said laugh, but I didn’t, much – just nodded at the gags and concepts I’d heard before.  Although Russell Kane….now he is original, but he does remind me of my SarfIssix roots a bit too much.  It is a good place for keeping tabs on your youngest, who in our case,  was sat in the front row, hoping to be picked on by the comedian.

In this case, that awfully nice Rich Hall did indeed pick on Lydia and derided her career choices (she admitted to wanting to be a psychologist, which I imagine would unnerve most comedians…) and we witnessed the whole episode, to our eternal mirth. I think that if I was to keep score, it was a 1-1 draw, with Rich Hall getting a bit wobbly at the end of the wannabe psychologist’s onslaught.   Kudos too, goes to Rich Hall for his innovative method of clearing the tent of the under 13’s by claiming that Justin Bieber was a vagina.  Or something like that.

The poetry tent is to be avoided.  This is difficult, because you have to walk past it to get everywhere.  The only point that I got close to having a peep inside was to see the veritable John Cooper Clarke, but then, I only wanted to chant along with “I married a monster from outer space” anyway.  No, avoid.  It is invariably a young poet trying to convince people that rap and shouting are indeed art forms.

The literature tent is where you go to do Radio 4 stuff (where were The Archers? An interview with Elizabeth Pargetter on why she is such a pr*ck would have been nice. for example) invariably involving Stuart Maconie fawning all over Simon Armitage, or John McCarthy talking about anything and everything.  I just liked the sound of JMcC’s voice.  This tent is also good because here is the place for a spot of people-watching.  We managed to spot the lesser leather-patched geography teacher in the wild.  You can tell them – they laugh too loudly at all the wrong places, and wear corduroy.  In fact, 90% of the audience in the literature tent are teachers or students.  It is a surprisingly nice way to spent a few hours, we found.

Everywhere else, well that is all music.  Pick who you want to see, and walk there and watch.  I think the record Sharon and I held was 10 minutes for Metronomy, and we stayed that long because we liked the bacofoil outfit the drummeress was wearing.  Simple Minds were a pastiche, Richard Hawley was a small God, and if Guy Garvey implored me to build another rocket boy, well, guess where I would be shoving it?  I loved seeing Daryl Hall, and Lloyd Cole. I was amazed at how darned southern the Alabama Shakes sounded, and I quite enjoyed Alt-J in a “I don’t understand this, but I’ll give it a shot” sort of way.

Beware.  Every single ‘new’ band you see will have referenced work from your halcyon days of music. You KNOW there is nothing original under the sun, and you should learn to accept that Metronomy were locked in a room with a bunch of Human League “Being Boiled” and OMD tapes.  Just go with it. No one around you is going to be impressed that you spotted that that riff is a straight lift from the 1978 Original Mirrors’ “Sharp words”…..

Alternatives

There is an alternative to spending 4 days in abject squalour, and one that I plan to put into action if I ever go again.

Every day, we traipsed the mile to the main arena in mud (a mile on tarmac is one thing, doing it on mud is like a cross between Ice-skating and dancing like Ian Curtis – oho, could it be said that I was “Dancing to Joy Division”?) and on our right was an fenced off area that you could, cruelly, I thought, see people exiting their camper vans, stretching to greet the morning sun (well, metaphorically at least) and looking like they had had the most relaxing night’s sleep ever.  There was grass around their pitches. They had space for awnings, and the smell of sausages and bacon gently sizzling on proper camping stoves almost bought me to my knees on more than one occasion.  I felt like I was a second class citizen – not only were we forced to see this nirvana as we trudged toward the festival, but we couldn’t photograph through the mesh fence!  Let me tell you there were some spectacular VW camper vans there.  Oh how the elite seem to live!  If I have one piece of advice to you – apart from a getting a good pair of wellies – it is find a camper van.

Conclusion

Well, you have to go through a bit of pain in order to understand what might be missing, and we did suffer, as you have seen.  It isn’t all bad – in fact, it is all quite good fun in the end.  I may have been guilty of accentuating the negative, but nothing can detract from seeing bands and artistes that you enjoy (Richard Hawley – you ARE a small God) and seeing the joy on my daughter’s face at being allowed to roam free without parental control or input.  She is still wearing her ID tag, two months later, and has a love of live music as a result.  Even thought she sat in the comedy tent most of the days.   No, I enjoyed myself although at times you wouldn’t have thought so to look at my fizzog.   Next year?  Well, I plan to either beg, borrow or acquire a camper van or start saving now to rent one of the glamping tents.   I shall wave at you from my VW palace or my glamping teepee  as you traipse through the mud next year.  You have to do it the hard way to know how to do it the easy way…..