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Plain Jane 310815: Watch where you walk Plain Jane 250915: A trip down memory...

Plain Jane 100915: Festivals are great – but please just count me out

Plain Jane 100915 I turn my back on Thanet for a mere moment and it all happens! Jeremy Corbyn (aka RIP any chance of a Labour Government for the next umpteen years) holds a rally in the Winter Gardens, Jarvis Cocker comes to town and Ellington Park has a music festival!

I do hope it went well but wild horses, etc. I love music but the thought of a festival brings me out in hives. I have never wanted to go to Glastonbury, or any of the other hundreds of such events that have sprung up all over the UK in recent years. Maybe if your en-suite Winnebago is parked up in the VIP area it might all be jolly good fun but why would us ordinary mortals want to wallow in mud with 150,000 other unwashed bodies, before squashing into a sweaty tent near the queue for the stinky temporary loos. 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. This makes me shudder further.

“Have you ever,” Neil McCormick wrote in The Telegraph, “tried to encourage a small child to hover over a hole big enough for him to fall through, below which is a visible river of merde?” No, I can’t say I have. And nor, I can assure you most fervently, would I want to. I carry lavender oil to smear beneath my nostrils (a tip given to me by a veteran festival-goer as it happens) in case I have to venture into any sort of potentially dodgy public convenience – even the kind with hand dryers and running water.

Yet here I am, enjoying a rhythmic extravaganza after all – the Gibraltar Music Festival! So far I have been treated to Duran Duran, Tom Odell, Ella Henderson and Paloma Faith. As I type, we are being promised Madness. And Kings of Leon, the headline act, are due up later tonight (my son is still shaking his head in despair at my ancientness, ignorance and lack of awareness since I confessed that up until yesterday, I didn’t know who they were). The queues to get in were horrendous, and I hardly dare think about the way the traffic will back up when it’s all over and the thousands try to get home.

But who cares – I won’t be one of them. For I am lying back on a Spanish balcony, just over the frontier from the Rock, where I can still hear the melodies, see the stage and watch the lights on the screens. Yes, yes, I know, you purists and seasoned Glastonbury-goers, that I am not getting the full experience. That actually being “there” is all about the atmosphere, of being one with the crowd, of the indefinable happy-clappy, gloriously dilettante escapism of the throb of the beat and the haze of marijuana hanging on the sweet air, but I don’t need that to relive my youth, I really don’t. I am having a very good time indeed. With no queues, no horrid loos, and ice in my gin and tonic. I tell you folks, when it comes to festivals, balconies are the way to go….

SHOPPING in the local hypermarket, Carrefour, I was amused to see a section marked “Inglaterra”. Here were shelves sporting all the products us Brits might like: Marmite, peanut butter, Walkers shortbread and PG Tips. And of course, taking pride of place – ex-pats have much to answer for – a neat stack of tins of Heinz baked beans. Is there no escape? I find the thought of eating mushy blobs in sweet red sauce revolting even when I’m at home. I’d almost rather go to a festival…

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Read the original at: http://www.thanetgazette.co.uk/Festivals-great-just-count/story-27773588-detail/story.html#ixzz3lsr8cem3

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