Charlie does Glastonbury
Monday, 25 June 2007
There’s a very funny article in the Guardian today by the excellent Charlie Brooker, who dons his emerging “grouch for all seasons” persona (rather than his former “foul-mouthed TV reviewer” persona) and buggers off to Glastonbury.
Having listed camping, mud and “loud noises” as three things he hates, he is forced to admit that by the halfway point at least, he’s actually enjoying himself. Brooker also reveals a somewhat mystifying friendship with Aisleyne Horgan-Wallace - whom he describes as “the ‘ghetto princess’ from last year’s Big Brother” - as well as an unexpected enthusiasm for Damian Marley.
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 100 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.
More here, unfortunately without the amusing photos that you can see in the paper.
