A Stormy Feast
I was introduced to festivals in my twenties (more than two decades hence) by a wild friend. The weather was good, the people were either young, free and relatively single, or older free spirits. Free was the byword. We all seemed to smoke, we drank pints of beer or cider and we resided in tiny tents with little sanitation. Our main aim was to listen to music, buy rainbow-coloured knitwear and lie around absorbing every minute of the summer experience.
This weekend, I accompanied my family (husband and 2 kids) to the Big Feastival near Chipping Norton. It marries good music with tantalising food. It's not the first time I've been, and since it was conceived in 2011 its audience has definitely evolved into a very different beast from that of five years ago.
It was never the care-free, slightly smelly youth of my early festival days, but it was a happy-go-lucky group of people, with one or two foodies thrown into the pot. This year, it seemed to be the antithesis of blithe spontaneity. It appeared to be a group of middle-class middle-Englanders pretending to be free and easy. They came with their mud-free Hunter wellies, their bean bags and newly acquired LayBags (watching grown men run round trying to inflate huge cerise socks is more entertaining than the acts), and their festival wagons, complete with Emma Bridgewater cot bumpers and raincovers. I haven't even mentioned the camping chairs, picnic rugs and full-sized parasols.
"Hey!" I hear you say. "We may be middle-class, middle-Englanders masquerading as party animals, but - although we'll be back in the office on Monday - we are roughing it! Look, we're camping."
Yes, but are you though? Long gone are the pop-up festival tents. In their place are 8-berth canvases, with tables, chairs, bunting and fairy lights. Say adios to the old VW vans chortling along the back lanes to Kingham. Say hello to three metre-long campers with solar electricity, showers and chemical loos.
But please don't moan at me for criticising this new, organised audience. I'm one of them. I enjoy my home comforts so much that when the thunder storm made its unwelcome entrance, bringing sheet rain for more than an hour, I took a picture with my SLR, turned tail and took my brood home. After all, I'd forgotten my Joules raincoat!
