I've always liked festivals, but now I love them. Mainly because I 'found love' at one. Plus, it's a brilliant 'how we met' story and so much better than 'we met through friends' (yawn) or 'on the internet' (calculated).
One of my mates was actually conceived at Glastonbury in 1984, when his parents met while watching The Smiths on the Pyramid stage. How cool is that? My eyes met Claire's while watching Lily Allen in a field in Essex, at the 2007 V Festival. That year was as magical and romantic as Woodstock for us, even if we did share a first kiss at a tent called the 'JJB Arena'. Classy.
Yet summer festivals haven't always been this spectacular. As a teenager unable to afford tickets, I once worked at a famous rock festival in the Midlands because it seemed the best way to meet the much-promised girls in attendance. They said I'd be litter-picking. I ended up cleaning the toilets, which was the most harrowing experience of my life.
I rode around the festival grounds on a small truck known as the 'Jobby Sucker' with a team of grim workmen, sticking a pipe down the toilets and watching it suck up all the poo and bog roll, before moving on to the next one.
The only girls I met were stood cross-legged, desperate for me to finish so they could do a wee. A wage of £60 for a 12-hour working day was quite literally taking the piss, and I didn't get the smell off my hands for days.
Yet I was still convinced that festivals were the ultimate place to meet cool girls. Any girl who takes herself too seriously won't like mud, so festivals are a Mecca for fun-loving, booze-drinking, good-time chicks. And, what's more, there are about 100,000 of them there.
I must also profess I have a weakness – no, a fetish – for girls wearing wellies with dresses (like hot farmers' daughters, or Kate Moss, or both!). Yet many summers after my experience with the Jobby Sucker, I was still getting no luckier with festival loving. In fact, I even dumped a girlfriend at the V Festival one year, after a quite ridiculous demonstration of high-maintenance behaviour. Unbelievably, Natalie* took one look at my one-man tent and stormed off to find a nearby B&B. The next night, with a face like thunder, she paid for a taxi to drive her 40 miles back to her home in London, and I told her not to bother coming back for the Sunday. 'I don’t do camping,' she whined, and it was enough to put me off for good. You see, men like 'all-weather' girls and festivals are a litmus test for any young lady who claims to be vaguely 'outdoorsy'. If she's there at midnight, dancing in the rain, drunk, to a band neither of you have heard of, then she's a keeper.
I met Claire just like that. I was wearing an inflatable chair as a rain hat. She looked awesome (in a dress and wellies, of course) and had managed to carry a tray of Mojitos 400 yards across possibly the muddiest, most dangerous terrain this side of Saving Private Ryan – without spilling a drop. That's the thing with festivals: If you meet a girl under these circumstances - using a newspaper as bog roll; smearing Vicks inside your nostrils to mask the smell of the toilets; sleeping in an inch of water in a one-man tent; then you know that, together, you'll have a laugh anywhere. Perhaps even on a Jobby Sucker.
One of my mates was actually conceived at Glastonbury in 1984, when his parents met while watching The Smiths on the Pyramid stage. How cool is that? My eyes met Claire's while watching Lily Allen in a field in Essex, at the 2007 V Festival. That year was as magical and romantic as Woodstock for us, even if we did share a first kiss at a tent called the 'JJB Arena'. Classy.
Yet summer festivals haven't always been this spectacular. As a teenager unable to afford tickets, I once worked at a famous rock festival in the Midlands because it seemed the best way to meet the much-promised girls in attendance. They said I'd be litter-picking. I ended up cleaning the toilets, which was the most harrowing experience of my life.
I rode around the festival grounds on a small truck known as the 'Jobby Sucker' with a team of grim workmen, sticking a pipe down the toilets and watching it suck up all the poo and bog roll, before moving on to the next one.
The only girls I met were stood cross-legged, desperate for me to finish so they could do a wee. A wage of £60 for a 12-hour working day was quite literally taking the piss, and I didn't get the smell off my hands for days.
Yet I was still convinced that festivals were the ultimate place to meet cool girls. Any girl who takes herself too seriously won't like mud, so festivals are a Mecca for fun-loving, booze-drinking, good-time chicks. And, what's more, there are about 100,000 of them there.
I must also profess I have a weakness – no, a fetish – for girls wearing wellies with dresses (like hot farmers' daughters, or Kate Moss, or both!). Yet many summers after my experience with the Jobby Sucker, I was still getting no luckier with festival loving. In fact, I even dumped a girlfriend at the V Festival one year, after a quite ridiculous demonstration of high-maintenance behaviour. Unbelievably, Natalie* took one look at my one-man tent and stormed off to find a nearby B&B. The next night, with a face like thunder, she paid for a taxi to drive her 40 miles back to her home in London, and I told her not to bother coming back for the Sunday. 'I don’t do camping,' she whined, and it was enough to put me off for good. You see, men like 'all-weather' girls and festivals are a litmus test for any young lady who claims to be vaguely 'outdoorsy'. If she's there at midnight, dancing in the rain, drunk, to a band neither of you have heard of, then she's a keeper.
I met Claire just like that. I was wearing an inflatable chair as a rain hat. She looked awesome (in a dress and wellies, of course) and had managed to carry a tray of Mojitos 400 yards across possibly the muddiest, most dangerous terrain this side of Saving Private Ryan – without spilling a drop. That's the thing with festivals: If you meet a girl under these circumstances - using a newspaper as bog roll; smearing Vicks inside your nostrils to mask the smell of the toilets; sleeping in an inch of water in a one-man tent; then you know that, together, you'll have a laugh anywhere. Perhaps even on a Jobby Sucker.
