Wednesday, July 21, 2004
24 hours from now i'll be trudging through a field of cowshit and women with beards trying to find a space to pitch my tent in the foetid dark wasteland that is central Reading. If it weren't for the world's greatest music festival, WOMAD, taking place in the imminent vicinty of said bivouacced apparel I would not be doing this. Fuck it, I wouldn't be in England at all. I'm looking forward to not missing it one little bit, hopefully.
This will be our seventh WOMAD in a row and while they continue to not book anybody i've ever heard of (which quite incidentally keeps every known chav in Britain away from the site) I shall continue to regard it as the one annual festival that requires compulsory attendance.
And for the first time, we're doing it in style. Taking no food, very few clothes and some fancy new camping equipment. Hiring a car at the skyport and going straight there. Pitching, probably some bitching, then straight in for a fat free-range aubergine and organic water fajitaburger paid for with an exorbitant sum of fair-trade money and served by a smiling, emancipated African chicken-killer (I generalise here to highlight my enormous shame and disgust at the fact that this very type of gentleman was once 'employed' by my grandparents). Wake up friday morning, shake my chakras, tai my chi, salute the sun and do her downward doggystyle and then its 72 hours of the best music from a place most people in England snootily think of as 'the rest of the world'. Still, for the few Americans that are aware of the Earth, this music is known as 'Worldbeat' which is even worse. So it's fine, be pricks if you have to. It's just more space for me to enjoy the festival with only Mr and Mrs Well-Meaning from Croydon and their 8,000 clones occasionally annoying me with their sheer earnestness. I swear half of them are here because they feel guilty about England's past colonial history. And half of them bring their kids so they can inculcate some guilt in them nice and early too. Me, I'm here for the music.
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This will be our seventh WOMAD in a row and while they continue to not book anybody i've ever heard of (which quite incidentally keeps every known chav in Britain away from the site) I shall continue to regard it as the one annual festival that requires compulsory attendance.
And for the first time, we're doing it in style. Taking no food, very few clothes and some fancy new camping equipment. Hiring a car at the skyport and going straight there. Pitching, probably some bitching, then straight in for a fat free-range aubergine and organic water fajitaburger paid for with an exorbitant sum of fair-trade money and served by a smiling, emancipated African chicken-killer (I generalise here to highlight my enormous shame and disgust at the fact that this very type of gentleman was once 'employed' by my grandparents). Wake up friday morning, shake my chakras, tai my chi, salute the sun and do her downward doggystyle and then its 72 hours of the best music from a place most people in England snootily think of as 'the rest of the world'. Still, for the few Americans that are aware of the Earth, this music is known as 'Worldbeat' which is even worse. So it's fine, be pricks if you have to. It's just more space for me to enjoy the festival with only Mr and Mrs Well-Meaning from Croydon and their 8,000 clones occasionally annoying me with their sheer earnestness. I swear half of them are here because they feel guilty about England's past colonial history. And half of them bring their kids so they can inculcate some guilt in them nice and early too. Me, I'm here for the music.
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