my stuff
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
festival festivities and the noisy fuckers with the yurt
I was at the Tartan Heart festival with lots of my lovely friends over the weekend. Finished work on Thursday night (couldn’t see it behind me quick enough!) and headed straight up to Inverness and beyond. We got there late, and after I drank a shit load of wine and smoked a large amount of weed I conked out in our tent only to be rudely woken up by the bastards in the tents all around us singing BAD tunes (I’m talking bad bad tunes, terrible tunes, evil tunes) accompanied by a BAD guitar player, involving lots of BAD singing. I couldn’t believe I was awake at 6am, I was so fecking knackered all week I was sure I’d get a lovely sleep. Hey ho.
So, lying there in my sleeping bag, listening to the first verse and chorus of ‘stuck in the middle with you’ for the 800th time and seething (literally, seething. Which is quite hard in a tent, in a sleeping bag, with a very drunk and freshly to bed husband lying beside you. There’s not much you can do to express the seething other than tut really loudly and move your legs a bit). I’d shouted ‘shut the fuck up’ a couple of times but being the gravely voiced chick that I am it sounded more like ‘sh tha ck uh’ so it didn’t make any dent in the noise and didn’t really make me feel any better either.
So I decided to go to the toilet and give them a bit of an evil look on my way there and back and low and behold when I got up (after dressing really noisily and unzipping my tent really noisily and struggling out of it really noisily and standing up really noisily to demonstrate just how seething I was ) I saw one of my lovely friends sitting in their porch (seething) and making a spliff. After going to the toilet I sat down with her, we cracked open some red wine, had a spliff and moaned about the noisy bastards for a while. One by one my friends woke up.
So the day began. Having been awake at 6 I seriously thought this was the start of a bad weekend, but for some reason the god of good times decided to reward my bad sleep with a truly fantastic day . Hurrah. It started off with the wine and the spliff and slowly but surely we all cracked open various receptacles of booze and munched on some nice breakfast and had a good old chat and did up our dishes and and then made our way over to the first couple of bands that we wanted to see. I didn’t really care about anything other than The Bees ( look them up, buy their stuff, be happy ) but Ka dragged me off to see The Editors and I’m really impressed. They had a good time too which always makes a difference. Bandito dragged me off to see an African guy who played mental instruments and was lovely and Ka dragged me off to the bar on more than one occasion to ogle the TRULY GORGEOUS bar man that kept making eyes at her (naughty Ka).
Normally at festivals the drink is SHIT and EXPENSIVE and generally not the sort of thing you’d drink ever in a million years unless you were pie eyed already and there was nothing else going to be available EVER (like Tennents and Carling). That is because people who organise festivals are corporate whores and get lots of cheap booze off booze companies. But this one, being a lovely wee festival, had a totally different ethos altogether and had all different kinds of booze that you could buy (and not just pissy weak lager) and so everybody was happy. But mostly everybody drank the local beer that was on offer cos it was £2.50 a pint, it was organic and it was heather brewed. Oh and it was p-o-t-e-n-t.
Nobody paced themselves at all, in fact we all did very good impressions of little kids with bags of sweets and gorged ourselves on the lovely amber nectar.
The Bees were rockin’ and I loved them and I was very red and hot and sweaty dancing to them but they were SO MUCH FUN and made me laugh and then Alabama 3 came on and it was a bit boring (because all their songs are exactly the same but with different words, in my opinion) and then we went back to the campsite and had a couple of drinks before heading into our tents because it was raining. Well, pissing down actually.
The noisy fuckers kept up their noisy fuckerness for the NEXT night, by this time they’d put up a yurt which held over 30 of the fuckers and provided fantastic cover from the rain so, commence BAD songs and BAD singing for a 2nd night.
Another shite sleep ensued but after a slow morning, a nap, some lovely food and a good chit chat with everybody I was raring to go again. We all decided to pace ourselves a bit better than the day before (as we sheepishly blinked at each other from underneath our hangovers, wiping our red wine lips roughly!) and as a result we kept it tidy. I saw British Sea Power (not bad actually) and the Peatbog Faeries (look them up, buy their stuff, be happy. But maybe only if you’re a choochter) who I love and haven’t seen for years and the Proclaimers who were exactly how you’d think they’d be (if you even have a clue who they are, I have no idea if these 2 have managed to penetrate anywhere beyond the Borders.
We all decided that if we had to shag one of them it would be the one who was standing on the right but none of us could explain why.
That night, we all sat round a few candles and enjoyed the fact that the rain was off, finally. We chatted and smoked and drank and listened to two of our friends playing the mandolin and the fiddle and generally we were all a bit puffed up and happy and very proud of what a great time we were all having and what lovely friends we had and what great memories we would all have when we were old and wrinkly.
And the noisy fuckers kept right on being noisy fuckers. We did all have to concede though that if we’d had a yurt we’d have no doubt been exactly the same, and once we all agreed to that, we knew that we would no longer be seething and we’d sleep well.
Well, okay maybe it wasn’t quite like that, it was mostly down to the amount of pot we smoked and the serious lack of sleep we’d encountered over the weekend, but what a great sleep we got anyway.
And so, Sunday came and the tents came down and the HUMUNGOUS amount of meat that was purchased by all of us was cooked up and the remaining rolls were stuffed with said meat and we pottered and we blethered and we started the descent through Scotland, through the beautiful Cairngorms and back into a sunshiney Sunday afternoon in Edinburgh.
I really enjoyed that. I really really did. I don’t know if it’s because it’s a small, independent festival or if it’s because it’s miles away from anywhere, or if it’s because run of the mill bands like Oasis and Coldplay and Keane and the Darkness weren’t playing that made it special (most probably a combination of all 3 of those aspects!) but it felt really special. Even with the noisy fuckers in the campsite, they weren’t awful noisy fuckers, they were just pissed and annoying, but they were having fun just like us.
Everybody was in a really good mood, even with the torrential rain and there wasn’t this expectancy in the air of ‘band bagging’ that I always associate with festivals ‘yeah, I saw them. And I saw them too and I ran to the dance tent and saw them for 10 minutes before, like, running back to the main stage to get 3 minutes of them’. People were out for a good time. If they saw some good bands then great, if they had a great craic in the booze tent then, well, great too.
So, I am definitely going to go back.
Next year though, I’m camping in the family campsite and letting the noisy fuckers get on with it without me.
If I’m not one of the noisy fuckers, that is. Now where did I put that yurt pole?
**update** the lovely mousemilk has sent me some piccies off the British Sea Power's website of the crazy bear that made an appearance during their set, I'd forgotten all about it till he sent the links. And I'm glad to know that it wasn't a weed induced hallucination Phew. If anyone finds any more photies, let me know please and thank you! xxx
10:52 pm - 15 August 2005
