Dawn of the Dumb (46 page)

But who should I go with? Everyone I knew either didn’t want to go or already had a ticket. In fact, the only person who’d expressed any interest at all was Aisleyne Morgan-Wallace, the ‘ghetto princess’ from last year’s
Big Brother
, who has, inexplicably, become a friend of mine in recent months. So I invited her.

Since Aisleyne knew even less about camping—or Glastonbury—than I did, it gave me the chance to play the expert. Over the phone, I sagely listed all the equipment she’d need, down to the waterproof socks, while she took notes. The day before the festival, she rang to double-check her inventory.

‘I’ve got a tent from Argos/ she said. ‘It was only £7.99.’

Unfortunately for Aisleyne, I didn’t know enough about camping to realise that wasn’t a good idea.

We bagged a lift with some friends of mine, both Glastonbury veterans who wouldn’t raise an eyebrow all weekend. The arrival was a shock. Being an almighty and unashamed puss, I’d never been to a music festival before, let alone the biggest one in Europe.

Having parked somewhere behind the smallest of Saturn’s moons, you have to trudge on foot across what feels like the width of a small county, lugging all your equipment on your back, staring grimly at smartarses who’d had the good sense to cart their stuff on to the site in a wheelbarrow. Laden with half the contents of the Clapham branch of Black’s, I scarcely fitted through the gate. Straps dug into every square inch of my flesh. My shoulders grew extra muscles just so I could pull them. And the walking never stopped. This was like being in the army, except at least there you get to let off steam by machine-gunning people in their thousands.

Once you’re in, the sheer scale of it is initially overwhelming. Imagine forcing the cast of Emmerdale to hurriedly construct Las Vegas at gunpoint in the rain. Then do it again. And once more for luck. That’s Glastonbury: a cross between a medieval refugee camp and a recently detonated circus. Roads of sloppy mud and drunken civilians shivering in tents; this is what London would look like if I’d been in charge for a hundred years. Not because I’m some kind of laid-back dreamer, but because I couldn’t organise a piss-up in a pissery. It’d take me six decades to assemble the most rudimentary infrastructure. There’d be no museums in my London. Maybe a bin or two, at a push.

Wherever I looked, there were options. Things to do. Food stalls, poetry huts, henna-tattoo dungeons…and music. It was only Thursday, and the headline acts weren’t due till Friday, but already there were sound systems and bands and people banging musical pots together. Yet in the midst of so much choice, I had focus. I knew what I wanted to do. Leave.

Instead, I had to pitch my tent. The
Guardian
wanted me to camp out in the main fields, among the public. I chickened out and opted to set up home in the backstage compound (which turned out to be a mistake—more on this later).

The pop-up a tent was a joy. It comes flat, disc-shaped. You throw it in the air and it unfurls into a canvas shell. Within seconds I was the proud owner of a home fit for a tramp. Aisleyne’s Argos special took longer to assemble, and turned out to be a striking visual definition of the word ‘flimsy’. If Christmas crackers came with folded-up tents inside, they’d look like this. It seemed to be made out of soluble material—possibly the same stuff as those translucent breath-mint strips that dissolve on your tongue.

But it wasn’t raining yet—in fact, the air was downright balmy—and I was optimistic. Perhaps camping would be fun. Hell, I might stay here for the whole thing. I went to the backstage bar, which seemed to be full of people hugging themselves with joy at being ‘allowed’ backstage. (The sole advantage to a backstage pass, incidentally, is that the area doubles as a short cut between the two main stages. That’s it. That’s all you’re ‘missing’.)

We left the backstage area and headed off into the ‘proper bit’. Getting in touch with my festival-hardened friends soon proved impossible—text messages were taking two hours to arrive, making it impossible to sync up a meeting.

Outside the backstage compound, everyone was astonishingly friendly. And astonishingly everywhere. It was like the height of rush hour conducted by lazy people in love. When someone stepped on your foot, they apologised. There was laughter and music, genuinely funny T-shirt slogans and a palpable sense of relaxed excitement. We walked up to the Lost Vagueness area and saw people eating in dodgems and children dressed as spacemen. For an eight-year-old, Glastonbury probably makes more sense than, say, Basingstoke.

After hours of walking and gawping, we headed back to the hospitality section, stopping at a food stall along the way. (The food at Glastonbury was far, far better than I’d expected, by the way.) Then, full and happy, I headed to my tent for an early night. Which is when things started to go wrong.

If there’s one piece of Glastonbury advice I can give you, it’s this: don’t camp backstage. On the plus side, there was no flooding, no thieving, and the toilets did indeed flush properly. On the minus side, at 3
AM
a group of post-pubescent upper-middle-class music-industry git-sacks pitched their tent beside mine, and no power on Earth could make them stop braying witless bullshit at the top of their idiot lungs.

For hours they tramped round my tent, tripping over the guy ropes and gurgling. One of them had a bassoon. All of them were howlingly impressed with themselves. It suddenly occurred to me that if you fashioned a thick block of concrete the precise shape of the backstage compound, and dropped it from a helicopter, crushing everyone below, you’d improve the quality of life on the planet by at least 3 per cent.

The most annoying one was an infuriating raspy-voiced nincompoop who kept waving a blue light-sabre around, subtly flirting with his female companions by pretending it was a glowing penis. And when he wasn’t doing that, he was bragging about how much ketamine he’d taken.

‘George, I’m fucked…I’m going to fall over any second,’ he rasped. He was saying this while bouncing up and down next to my head. He’s going to break my neck, I thought. I’m going to have my neck broken by a prick with a light-sabre.

All the goodwill for humankind I’d built up during the day drained away in seconds. I felt like ripping through the side of my tent and pushing his eyes into the back of his skull with my thumbs—which isn’t really in keeping with any festival spirit I know of.

Instead, I sulked off for a charming moonlight piss. But by now, the bog was overflowing. Someone—maybe Pete Doherty—was defecating noisily in the cubicle beside me. I returned to my tent only to discover someone had taken my wellies and inexplicably left them outside. Then I unzipped the door and found a stranger sleeping on the floor. And then I realised it wasn’t my tent. Of course, even in the dark, mine should have been easy to spot. It was the one with a bunch of light-sabre-swinging twats beside it.

The next morning I awoke feeling as if I’d been beaten up. But I’d had it easy compared to Aisleyne, whose joke tent had been kicked to death by an early-morning downpour. She was soaked through, and claimed to have cried herself awake—which is quite a skill.

And then it rained and rained and rained. The whole site resembled a war zone: I couldn’t believe the mud, which seasoned visitors were already shrugging off as nothing compared to ‘97. All I wanted was a hot bath in the cottage, which by now sounded like the promised land. I couldn’t face this merry hell without my creature comforts. Sod camping. Sod it to the moon and back. The thought of being kept awake another night by Captain Lightsabre was too much to bear. Macho be damned. I needed cosseting.

I didn’t see any bands that afternoon. I had a bath, stretched out on a comfy sofa, drank tea and watched
Operation Petticoat
on Channel 4. Then I went back to the site, headed up to the Healing Fields, and got an excellent neck massage. Thus recharged, I returned to the breach and proceeded to drink heavily. This, I discovered, is key to enjoying the festival. Your mind needs to be dislodged from its normal position; your filter adjusted to the point where stomping through endless mud ponds seems gently amusing rather than, say, grindingly depressing. In fact, the mud eventually becomes nothing more than an ever-present slapstick punchline. The first time you fall over in it, you feel angry and stupid. Second time you shrug and laugh and scarcely care.

Mind you, I had a flouncy cottage with hot running water. The people in tents must be idiots.

The rest of Friday night became a bewildering, enjoyable blur—so much so, summing up individual moments feels pointless. I bumped into a friend with kids and carried her daughter on my shoulders through half the Arctic Monkeys set, like I was Phil bloody Hogan or something, before heading for the Jazz stage to catch the end of Damian Marley (who was fantastic). Then there was more drink and more things to see. At some point, I realised something was wrong with my face. It was smiling.

Saturday was equally strange and fun. I ended up backstage at the Roots tent watching Damian, Stephen and Ziggy Marley, after one of the 3
AM
girls blagged us in. Hanging around with Aisleyne has unforeseen advantages. Aisleyne, incidentally, had recovered from her tent trauma and was now in her element. Although she failed to teach me to skank.

At Glastonbury, I’ve learned, for every high, a low will inevitably follow, generally a low involving a large amount of rain or mud or both. If you’re lucky the highs cancel out or even outweigh the lows. So far, I’ve been lucky. Fate dictates that’ll have changed by the time you read this—there’ll be a tornado or a massacre in the interim to redress the balance. But for now, at the time of writing, here in the
Guardian
Portakabin, I’m enjoying the Glastonbury festival. Something, somewhere, has gone terribly wrong in my universe.

All men are created equal, just like airline seats aren’t

[9 July 2007]

C
ease wailing, rain-lashed scumsacks, and gasp at my jet-set lifestyle. I’ve just returned from a bracing whistle-stop tour of Baltimore—or more specifically, the most impoverished, crime-blighted corners of Baltimore, where we were shooting a documentary about the drama serial
The Wire
(which is largely set on said corners).

To a wuss like me, it was an industrial-strength eye-opener: boarded-up windows, needles in the grass, crack vials littering the pavement and open-air drug markets aplenty. A staggering corpse of a neighbourhood, so ravaged and despairing that each time you spot a dead rat (roughly every ten minutes) you assume it committed suicide.

In short, an obscenity; standing in stark relief to the toothless tourist-oriented central waterfront, where our hotel, a faceless slab running on Windows, sat coolly humming its way through a minor heatwave. Two worlds, same city. Madness.

Just to make the rich/poor contrast even more apparent, I’d flown there First Class for the first time in my life. Not by choice, you understand. The production paid for ‘Premium Economy’ tickets, and on top of these I was unexpectedly granted an upgrade. When I stepped on board the stewardess ushered me leftward, to the promised land.

In First Class, I had a seat that reclined far enough to become a flat bed. I drank champagne and ate smoked salmon from a china plate with weighty silverware while watching a flat-screen TV. When I got bored of that, there were a couple of framed pictures on the wall. That was the weirdest, most needless touch. They weren’t interesting—just photographs of city skylines—but they weren’t there to be looked at. They were there to make me feel special.

‘If a terrorist shoe-bombs a hole in the fuselage right now,’ I thought, ‘and the plane corkscrews toward the ocean at 1,000 mph, I’m going to fix my gaze on that gilt-framed photograph and remind myself I’m dying in the lap of luxury.’

At the time, I didn’t really appreciate these myriad notional blowjobs. But come the return flight, stripped of any upgrade, I missed them so hard I went through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Apart from the last one.

Just as Starbucks serves buckets of hot milk in ‘Tall’, ‘Grande’ and ‘Venti’ sizes instead of’small’, ‘medium’ and ‘large’, so airline seating distinctions, whatever they’re called, actually break down into ‘Misery’, ‘Misery Lite’, and the highest achievable grade—‘Slightly Comfortable’. I was now seated in ‘Misery Lite’, which was twice—
twice—
the cost of mere ‘Misery’, despite the only difference being a slight spatial increase. Every aspect of Misery Lite was a just a tad crapper than First Class, for no reason other than it
had
to be, in order to keep First Class seeming First Class. The seat reclined (but not too far), the blanket crackled with static, the cutlery was plastic, and the meal smelt like a stomach wound. The in-flight TV had the same movie selection, but a smaller screen. Even the headphones were cheaper. If it were possible, they’d make the air thinner too.

Trouble is, the people in First Class never get to see any of this, because they’re separated by a curtain. For all they know, the whole notion of seating classes could be a con: there might be an open fireplace and conveyor belt sushi bar at the back of the plane. Surely this is missing the point. Whip back the curtain. Treat the First Class fat cats to a guided tour of the poky sardine conditions. Only then can they appreciate their fortune.

Mind you, since comfort is relative, the airlines could, in turn, raise the spirits of the Economy section by introducing a new Sub-Economy class, in which society’s most impoverished passengers travel for free, provided they stand atop rickety stools with a noose round their necks for the duration of the flight. Suddenly your cramped Economy seat will feel like a gilded throne in comparison. For about ten minutes. Until the veins in your leg explode.

If they must take the rich/poor divide to the skyways, they could at least be creative about it. Here’s the ultimate in First Class entertainment: an interactive screen displaying a floorplan of the economy section. Tap any seat, and up pops a live shot of its luckless proletarian inhabitant. Now, using a videogame-style joypad, you control his environment. You can halt his in-flight movie forty minutes in, turn the sound so low his ears have to squint to hear it, or play it at half normal speed, so
Die Hard 4
seems to be taking place underwater.