Aug 19 2008 2:41 pm,
So this weekend I set out to V Festival to enjoy the sounds of…uuh well yeah whoever was playing. I used to go to V when I was in my wee teens as it was close to where I grew up and for some reason it seemed like a safer festival to attend when I was 14 than say, Underaged And Underplagued or Pitch Your Bitch Fest (both or one of these festivals might/have been fabricated) and I really did used to enjoy it. I lost my dancing-at-gig virginity at V (Faithless, right at the front, saw my best friend Lizzie moving up and down so I copied her and it was good!) my crying-whilst-watching-a-band-live virginity, (Coldplay, I was in love with Chris Martin and I saw my best friend Lizzie doing it so I copied her, it was moving!) and my actual virginal, penetrative virginity (The Hives, I saw my best friend Lizzie doing it and..hang on a minute this isn’t true), so I trotted off to my editor Niall’s house with all these precon(tra)ceptions and memories in my head so I could get on my way to the fields of Chelmsford.
I fucked up first of all because I realised I hadn’t touched my Oyster Card in at Cambridge Heath, so when I got to his neck of the woods there were no barriers so I could have really gotten away with not paying for the journey but then I saw a woman who worked there so I touched out then I was all ‘why did I do that?’ when I got to Niall’s and he was like ‘go back and touch in so you don’t get charged’, (sorry I just realised this is probably really irrelevant to people who don’t own Oyster Cards, or generally people who aren’t me come to think of it) so I done that and it was sorted, but my mind wasn’t feeling at all in its right place. We left
On arriving at the festival I knocked back a couple of ciders and we went for a wander to the new bands tent where we saw One Eskimo. ‘Fuck standing up, I’m going to sit on the ground’, I thought as I sat on the ground. I was shattered already, not drunk yet but it was the first band I’d gone out to see all day and my legs were already a little bit like a new born baby deer’s. After that, I nipped off to Virgin Festival Radio’s VIP area (mad props to Cat Macdonald and Raziq Rauf for getting me in there), where I devoured some bean stew and a beer that I mainly let the grass have a big sip of. I was still requesting the horizontal form of existence at this point whilst knocking back some incredibly lovely cocktails and listening to The Script bellow out their power-pop-pancreas’. All of a sudden it was time for Muse and I was back on my weary feet feeling pished as a newt and needing to constrain it, you know when you feel like you’ve peaked way to early and everyone else is still having a lot of fun getting there? So we stand there and watch Muse, I think it’s good but at this point in my memory everything has gone black and I can remember asking for a sip of Raz’s hipflask and him going, ‘really, are you sure?’ and me grabbing it like some cigarette butt scavenging Hackney witch and going ‘yeah!’ and taking a swig that no doubt got absorbed in to my chin.
Just when everyone was having loads of aural fun and the band are really getting into the swing of their..whatever they do.. all of a sudden there’s no time to request to sit down and watch, I am free falling, slowly me and the grass that I so kindly fed my beer to earlier were hugging and I am completely lying flat on the floor. Don’t know what happened then but I know Niall kept on telling me to ‘SORT IT AWT’, the
Any way, then I went to bed and that was this year’s V Festival experience, I am a bit gutted I missed it all but in my defence I moved house last week and I got burgled a few months ago and it’s been a draining 7 years since I last visited. Here’s hoping next weekend’s Reading festival will make me a little bit more erect.
