THE FLYING PORT-A-LOO INDEX
SCORE
6.2
Every festival is a series of choices, some of them good, some of them bad. Except
for Glastonbury 2010, when every choice was spectacularly bad. Like somehow
managing to choose that portaloo – of all the portaloos – the one in the corner
slightly apart from the rest, seconds before it was elevated six feet in the air by
a nearby forklift, to be carried to another part of the site, until you squealed like
a pig and were freed; and then missing Stevie Wonder, Muse, Faithless, Gorillaz,
Shakira and Chase & Status, but managing to catch Rolf Harris, and dancing along
to Two Little Boys whilst wearing your Lostprophets MEGALOLZ t-shirt. How
were you to know? It was a more innocent time.
THE
KEITH-RICHARDSMEMORIAL-GARDEN INDEX
SCORE
10
THE DARK-SIDE-OF-THE-MOON
INDEX
SCORE
3
Every festival has a DSMI.
It’s one of the main reasons people
who don’t like festivals don’t like
festivals: the sanitation issue. A lot
of these people are the same ones
who won’t use the loos at work neurotic, OCD types who hover over
the toilet seat with a hanky over their
face. The thought of being locked in
a steaming portaloo is terrifying to
them. Sometimes they have a point.
That time at Green Man. Was it 2007?
When half of the portaloos were
crushed by a runaway crew truck, and
that same night the dump-pumper
malfunctioned. By Sunday morning
it was like the Battle of the Somme,
if by Somme you mean faeces. They
called it Brown Man that year. It was
the year Robert Plant got a standing
ovation for his song Big Log.
If you can, always stay
till the very end of a
festival, or at least till
Monday afternoon. That
way you can go beachcombing through what
feels like the detritus of
some great, surprisingly
hedonistic
battle.
I
believe Glastonbury three
years ago was the biggest
KRMGI in festival history.
By all accounts. The first
100,000 had left or joined
the queue to leave by 9am,
the ones for whom ‘leave
no trace’ means absolutely
nothing.
We
prayed
for their self-centred
souls and commenced
thereupon to scavenge.
We were a team of four.
Total haul: 148 baggies or
wraps containing smallto-medium amounts of
cannabis,
marijuana,
ketamine, cocaine and
MDMA; two beautiful
glass bongs; a meth lab;
three helicopters full of
money and a small island
in the Caribbean.