Bestival 2010

Shitty weather, astronomically priced cider and fifty thousand people so fucked they can no longer think, this is what British festivals are all about. And so it was this year at the smugly named Bestival on the Isle of Wight. Presumably the locals are used to the annual invasion by now, but it must still come as something of a shock to the elderly residents, who’s quiet, quaint little island is brutalised like in the time of the Vikings.

The attendance this year was increased to fifty thousand from thirty five, which resulted in the camp site looking and feeling more like a refugee crisis zone than somewhere people have paid to stay. Space between tents was non existent so laying awake at night you would become intimately involved in the sketchy, bullshit conversations going on next door. It also meant that navigating your way through the mire of pegs and ropes was like a pissed version of the crystal maze. That I didn’t fall through one of the things onto someone and get accused of attempted rape was itself a miracle.

The music was great, but was probably secondary to the fact that we could legitimately wake up and immediately start getting hammered. The frantic intoxication added to the surreal nature of the whole event, with bikini wearing girls on stilts, giant robotic spiders spouting fire and thousands of strange costumes not helping. On the first morning on the way to the already hellish toilets I saw a midget in a clown costume vomiting onto a fence. I had to stop and think long and hard about what I was seeing.

The first day went as expected, with everyone getting too excited and over exerting ourselves a tad. By which I mean I entirely lost my grip on reality and failed to sleep. Returning to the tent in the early hours I attempted to join a circle of neighbours, but ended up staring at them in silence, occasionally blurting out something that had absolutely no relevance to the conversation. The next day, running on fumes, I had to take it fairly easy so stopped partying around 2am after a quiet day of comparatively minimal, but varied, narcotic abuse.

Best act of the festival, up against contenders like Dizzy Rascal, Hot Chip, The Prodigy, and Rolf Harris, were four blokes wearing cricket outfits doing covers with ukuleles.

After four days I was ready to go, having had about as much fun as is physically and chemically possible. With washing having consisted of a wet wipe, and having collecting grime, sweat and blood in serious quantities, the bath I took once home looked like the BP oil spill, but was a screaming relief after dancing in mud like a tit non stop for the majority of the time. It did take some time to adjust to using a proper toilet again though, instead of just pissing where ever I stood.

London, SW4

Once again the bank holiday weekend has chewed me up and spat me into an oblivion of regret. Landing back in London on the Friday, already carrying a hangover like a soldier carrying the bloody corpse of a best friend, I was immediately sucked into a lifestyle that whilst I miss with every fibre of my being, would have left me either dead or a pair of sunken eyeballs sitting defeatedly in amongst a vaguely human shaped mess of rotting, yellowing flesh years ago.

Comparing the drinking cultures of Londoners and the Swiss is like comparing a tennis shoe to an exclamation mark. If you put the two next to each other it wouldn’t be so much a case of unrecognition as it would be an inability to register each other, like alien worlds that develop a certain form of perception, they just wouldn’t even know the other was even there.

Working in London city, alcohol is treated with roughly the same importance as oxygen. There was a bar in the office and the beer was free. Thursdays are the office drinking days, regardless of family and other such irrelevances. On my first day in the office in Switzerland, in a local restaurant, I asked for a small glass of wine at my welcome lunch. I may as well have grabbed the waitress and raped her on the table, slapping her arse whilst screaming the national anthem for the reaction the request got.

South West Four festival was on Clapham Common over the weekend, and it reveals the drug culture of the place like a flare gun in a bat cave. Clapham is basically a place where university students go to die in their current form and grow up into the surface level, tenuously respectable grown ups we all fear we’ll become when in our teens. Suddenly though, at this time of the year, at around 11am every single late twenty something stumbles into local bars and inhales cocaine, booze and ecstasy with a ferocious enthusiasm. Every trip to the bar for another round of drinks means another two or three best friends, as people turn and ask if you are off to the festival, which your planet sized pupils and twitching, eager smile would have already revealed to every sober person on the planet. And then you fall into a conversation which concurrently covers both your upbringings and the last 5 years of life, before, a minute and a half later, the drinks arrive and you leave your new soul mate to return to the group, who will now be in a conversation a world away from the one that was being shoveled out when you volunteered the round.

The festival itself is an awesomely confusing mess of mud, filthy techno, fairground rides and non sensical chat. The hours go by as seconds, and before you know it it’s all over; and you are sitting in a near by pub talking with passion about the importance of chair legs.

School boy humour

Shut down the humour workshops, close the satire magazines and fire all the stand ups. The absolute pinnacle and utter zenith of all comedy has been reached and it happened last night when the global spotlight fell on a football team called Young Boys who play at a stadium called the Wankdorf.

The world will now surely be darker place from here on in. Sure, we'll still be able to see guys getting hit in the balls by their children on You've Been Framed, and we may even manage to raise the odd smirk at the sight of a monkey masturbating on an internet link your colleague has sent you, but at the back of all our minds we'll have the heavy resignation that sexual innuendo about pre-pubescent boys thrown into football commentary has now been done and will never be bettered.

I was lucky enough to attend the game, taking place near the Swiss capital of Berne, in a little place called Wankdorf, in the Wankdorf stadium. I knew Wankdorf existed of course, but have, for a reason that I cannot begin to understand, never actually visited Wankdorf. If you'd have told me I would one day live within two hours train journey of a place called Wankdorf, I would reply that surely if that were to be the case then I would have no choice but to actually move into Wankdorf itself. I would take fresh pictures of the train station sign everyday, and begin to send postal letters regularly just so I could sign each letter 'in case of non delivery, please return to Wankdorf'.

The game itself was a blur of talk about being tight at the back, playing with spunk and keeping clean sheets. Afterwards I collapsed, a deflated and exhausted wreck. I think the football was supposed to have been pretty decent too.

The point I think I'm making here, as the lithium starts to kick in, is that to laugh at such things is not necessarily an indication that you have a ready built Friztel cellar in which you keep a selection of boy scouts for each occasion. The British press, reporting on the game, were the worst of all offenders, with a lot of the headlines feasting on the opportunity like a bulimic after a particularly cutting insult. But perhaps most of all, it's comforting to know that so many others sense of humour has evidently also stopped developing around the same time they starting crapping in a toilet.

Apparently in some cases, now that I am growing old and embittered, such jokes are 'inappropriate'. I strongly suspect that I'm not the only person who sometimes feels like the have woken up a decade or so after school, in an adult world in which they don't truly belong. I can do my job ok, even occasionally without the sort of incompetence that could bring the company crashing into oblivion in a heartbeat, but I am sometimes struck by a belief that at any moment someone will come around the corner, drag me out of my office and tell me that the game is up, this job isn't for someone who still secretly laughs at his own farts.

It was a relief therefore to see that this game with the unfortunately named Swiss team, seemed to reveal a similar outlook in humour from most people. And if you don't agree? Well you can address your letter of complaint to Mr A. Hole, Around the Corner and Up my Bum Street.

Beer Festival: Facial Hair and Regrets

I write this the morning after the Great British Beer Festival and have a message for those people who seem to think that real ale doesn’t leave you with a hangover. I say to them, come take a deep smell of my overpowering body odour and nauseating breath, behold the dark, viscous urine I am liberally splattering over the toilet seat, admire my reddened, sunken eyes and renounce your views forthwith. The stuff may be a far more pleasant drink than your standard tinned piss that is a Fosters or Carling, but I could be told right now that I was drinking poison direct from the fangs of the world's deadliest snake and I would believe you without blinking.

I attended last night with half a mind on Oktoberfest, the world’s largest meeting of liver haters, which is only a few weeks away. It’s important to try and avoid injuries and this would be a good warm up session, a chance to loosen up the drinking arm and see if I can push on to a more beer festival acceptable C cup before the main event.

We have though been going to the British festival since we were 17, before the weight of the world and full time employment broke and raped our spirits before being acquitted in court of all charges. This is still the one annual event that has us feel that glimmer of childhood excitement, the kind you used to feel before a birthday or Christmas when you were allowed out of the cellar and the beatings would subside just long enough for you to fight the dog for spilt leftovers. Good times.

Most of the charm of the event stems from the startling eccentricity of it all. It slaps you in face from the moment you are greeted at the main entrance by an old man wearing a deer stalker and a handlebar moustache, screeching in an impossibly high pitch voice that people should not linger by the doors. This bat-shit madness is further apparent in the bizarre, invariably sexual names, given to the beers by all the ancient breweries in attendance. Old Scrotum, Titty McCockle, Old Stoat Wobbler etc etc. The strangeness of the beers is seconded only the by the strangeness of the people. For some reason all the oddest of the nuttiest mentalists are attracted, dragging their ponytailed, pot bellied, cloak wearing arses from every small village and wood cabin in the country. These are the sort of people who would normally be ostracised from mainstream society, chided for their morbid obesity and fondness for wearing 18th century clothing. At the British Beer Fest though, these men are kings. Some of the examples of facial hair you see leave you no choice but to stand up and applaud.

The auction is always one of the highlights, during which the organisers ruthlessly exploit the inebriated, highly excitable groups of men, who invariably end up bidding hundreds of pounds for a collection of dirty beer mats or a rusty tray. Last night for instance, I came away the briefly proud owner of one ticket to a tour of a brewery, to take place mid week at a place hundreds of miles from where I am going to be on the day. In a different country.

We left having sampled barely a fraction of the thousands of available beers. The worst of which was a 12% European ale which might as well have been a melted car tire poured into a glass. Which reminds me, I must go for another piss.

The unbearable lightness of idiots

The ability of people to believe things that are patently untrue, to convince themselves of a phenomenal degree of utter cod-shit, is second only to the continuing existence of gerkins as a popular food source in it’s ability to amaze me.

Christians will happily tell you that a Jewish zombie, born of a virgin mother, can offer eternal life and protection from evil forces. Evil forces that exist mind you, because a talking snake convinced a woman to eat an apple. Muslims believe that 72 virgin, and therefore most likely ugly, women are waiting to perform what would presumably be pretty amateurish blowjobs on them in the afterlife.

At least though, the lunacy of these ideas could be argued to be at least somewhat offset by the length of their existence. Kind of like the way I argue that the rapidly perishing boxer shorts I’ve had since college should not be thrown out. They’ve earned their right to exist through perseverance.

Some of the crap that is kicked about though, has no excuse to be raised beyond the level of credibility you’d offer to a drunk, schizophrenic tramp telling you he’s the Queen of the Nile and will raise an army of crocodiles against north Kent unless you give him 20p for a cup of tea.

Step up and take a bow Scientology. The fact that this circle jerk of retardation has become such a massive, and, most critically, rich organisation is more depressing than watching a 14 year mother buying beer with food stamps at 7am on a Sunday. If I were the clichéd alien visiting planet earth and discovered this, I would have no choice but to assume that the population was made up of one over whelming majority capable on no more basic reasoning skill than your average pot plant, being ruthlessly manipulated by a small elite of utterly evil bastards, bleeding the idiots of their money like the gushing jugular of a slaughtered pig.

You’d have thought that the fact it was created by a man, L Ron Hubbarb, who was most prominent for writing science fiction would have been an insurmountable hurdle to becoming a popular religion in itself. It’s like someone trying to sell you a laptop, and in the opening spiel telling you it was built by a person who doesn’t normally build computers, but instead paints pictures of toasters. And not very good ones by all accounts.

But of course being a science fiction writer doesn’t automatically preclude you from being the chosen vessel through which an all powerful creator decides to reveal his existence. You’d like to think that any profession wouldn’t shut the door entirely to that possibility, but you’d also have to credit God with a well developed sense of humour to choose the writer of fictional stories to spread the message. You’d have also thought that he’d have done at least a little bit of due diligence, which would probably have revealed that Hubbarb was an habitual fraudster, having lied about his supposed Native American upbringing, his qualification in nuclear physics, or lack of them, his war record and his use of drugs. Fuck it though, God must have thought, if this guy can’t convince Tom Cruise that 750 million years ago billions of people were brought to earth by space ship before being piled around volcanoes and killed with hydrogen bombs, then NOBODY can.

Anyone with the faintest twitch of an intellect knows that these bullshit institutions are all about money and the subjugation of people either so desperate to believe in an after life that they are prepared to ignore all rational thought, or too stupid to think for themselves. Optimism in the decent abilities and intentions of our fellow humans are all well and good, but that we are outnumbered by idiots should never be forgotten. The viewing figures for Britain’s Got Talent and Dancing on Ice terrify me more then any description of hell you could throw at me.

On an entirely separate note, here is a donkey paragliding. Obviously no-one this side of a ruthlessly cruel tyrant would approve of actually doing this to an animal, but I see it in much the same way as the horrific experiments the Nazi’s performed on people during the war. To not laugh at the sight of the donkey flying gracefully into the sky under the parachute, would be to say its suffering was for nothing. It’s what Eeyore would have wanted.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEep5BrexT0

Sweating like a pregnant nun...

Summer has hit Zurich like a cop hits hippies at the May Day riots. With full force and near total approval of the general public. It seems to have been in or close to the 30's for a fortnight now, punctuated occasionally by storms of an intensity that I'd never seen in the UK. Storms in Zurich, rolling down off the goddamn Alps and streaming through the valley into town, are the abusive uncle of the storms you see in the UK, bigger, badder and capable of becoming violent without any warning, leaving you hiding under your bed, screaming that you couldn’t possibly take another beating.

Working by the lake has immediate benefits in that we’ve taken to spending our lunch breaks swimming, sunbathing and general frolicking in the ridiculously clear water, under the mountains, like idyllic Enid Blyton children before the advent of postmodern cynicism made such things seem homo-erotic and sinister. And now that I am engaged I’m happy to report that I no longer even notice the local college girls sunbathing topless. I swear to god they didn’t make tits that big when I was that young though. My guess is that when our generation reaches old age, we will talk less about how easy our grandkids have it with technology, what with their flying hover boards and automatic anus cleaning toilets, but instead will focus our bitterness on how our 16 year old Grandsons are dating girls with chests you could launch aircraft off.

There are some note worthy differences between the UK and Switzerland when it comes to summer and the weather in general. Most psychologically haunting is the eye-ball melting tendency of European men, in even the slightest bit of sunshine, to reach immediately for the Speedos, or in some cases that remain irrevocably damaging, thongs. Another thing I’ve noticed is that three days of sunshine doesn’t seem to constitute front page news over here. It’s not that the Swiss press won’t find other excuses to show hot girls in little clothing, like the English press does in instances of hot weather or the annual A-level results day, but they have clearly leapt to the outrageous conclusion that people do not need to be informed about how sunny it is when they could peel their wart-ridden arses off the sofa and take a look in the vague direction of the sky.

Perhaps the best element of the summer is being able to cycle into work, alongside the lake, laughing like a mad man all the way as I think of my friends struggling workwards as their faces are consumed by the sweaty flesh rolls of a fat man’s pungent armpit on the northern line of the tube. It’s a well known fact that it is illegal to transport cattle at the temperatures the London underground reaches on a hot day. Less known is the fact that the people who charge thousands and thousands of pounds for the right to use the abomination of a transport system, can’t blink or stand still for even a fraction of a second, for fear that the momentary pause would allow them to reflect on the inherent evilness of their existence and cause them to go instantly insane.

It’s not to say cycling into work is without its problems. Twice I have been stopped by the Swiss Gestapo as I peddled along, angelically making my way to the office. The first time I was committing the act of cycling in an area that was pedestrian only, but as it was entirely unmarked as such you were understood to know this as instinct, like a baby turtle heading to the water after hatching. The second time I was fined for running a red light. Technically I was bang to rights, but as it’s the second time I’m going to claim victimisation.

Indecent Proposal

I decided this week that I really don’t fancy receiving blow jobs in the long term, and so, approaching the situation in the most direct manner possible, proposed to the girlfriend.

Considering I’d just arrived back after a 17 hour flight, unshaven, barely coherent with tiredness and smelling like a loosely bowelled tramp, I wasn’t entirely convinced that I’d receive a positive response. I thought perhaps I should follow the traditional path when going through this and take her out to a good restaurant or a romantic location. I could surely stack the odds a little more in my favour by lacing the event with a degree of class, and perhaps her drink with some form of drug. As it turned out, I was too scared to hold onto the ring any longer without losing it and so dropped my bag of dirty travel clothes on the floor, got down on one knee and waited for her to come out of the loo. Perhaps I should have at least waited in the lounge, but I was easily able to blame the emotion of the occasion for my watering eyes, rather than the open toilet door.

Up there at the top of things you don’t want to hear when proposing to your girlfriend of 3 years, alongside ‘not with your face’ and ‘I’m fucking your Dad’, would be the word ‘no’. This was the first word out of her mouth. ’What in the name of fuck do you mean,”no”?’, I asked her, as calmly as I could manage – which was roughly as calmly as an aircraft passenger in a plummeting, burning plane would ask a flight attendant what exactly was happening.

Luckily by this point, it became clear from the fact she was crying, screaming and jumping up and down on the spot like someone caught on a powerful electric fence, that she had either said no out of shock or was having the most conveniently timed epileptic fit in the history of mankind. After a couple of firm back handed slaps to the face (we’re getting married, I can do that now right?) she calmed down and starting trying to asses how much I’d spent on the ring.

The next few days were spent trailing around various groups of friends and family, her basking in the rapturous attention and me explaining to disbelieving people just how much one diamond can apparently affect a girl’s reasoning skills.