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The
Edinburgh Fringe
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Fringe 2010 Blog - 5Latitude Day 1 - Thursday 15 July, 2010The toilets bothered me. Sorry I'll rephrase that, they didn't bother me. Rather, it was the prospect of them that bothered me. Not that I have anything against toilets in general, you understand. I actually quite like them and find them to be rather useful in the general scheme of things. I spend quite a lot of time in them every morning and after the occasional curry. No, toilets or the idea of them wasn't what was bothering me. It was a particular set of toilets that was the problem. Festival toilets. By that I don't mean a particular brand of toilet that lights up, plays music, smells of hot dogs and fires party poppers into the air every time you do your business (although that would be awesome, so I'll copyright that!) I'm talking about the toilet facilities that one tends to find at all the music festivals that show up every summer all over the country. Yes. THOSE toilets. The main problem was that I'd never been to a weekend-long festival. I've been to festivals of course, but only those in Hyde Park as a day-tripper. I'd never actually been to a festival. Not one with camping involved and mud and well, toilets. As a result, I didn't have any previous experience to go by. All I had to prepare myself for what was about to come was a couple of million horror stories on the internet and a few pieces of advice from random Facebook friends. Therefore, the picture I'd built in my mind of the festival toilets was one of absolute abomination. As far as I was concerned they were mud-locked, excrement infested cesspits with eye watering vapours emanating from the bubbling pools of human waste accumulated in the mud. An accidental slip into one these pools would result in the loss of an appendage or limb as you hurriedly withdrew a still smoking stub of a leg from the murkiness of the muddy swamp, the rest of your foot having melted into the acidity of the depths underfoot. Not even Gollum could have navigated his way around these marshes. So you'll understand it was with some trepidation that I rode alongside Simon in the company's hired van along the M3 to the festival site. At the time, the toilets weren't the only of my worries. It was getting dark and we were lost and the possibility of having to pitch our tents in the dark seemed to be an increasingly likely scenario. I had also just about managed to pick up a cold. My head felt like cotton wool and my nose was...we'll just leave it there shall we? In all events, we made it to the campsite after dark. Officially, the reason for that was because we drove slowly due to heavy rain. Unofficially, because we stopped to buy beer. We quickly set about pitching our tents. Now if you read any festival-goer advice lists, even the list on the Latitude Festival website itself, you'll find that one of the little gems of advice offered is that you should always check your tent before you set off because you might find yourself pitching an unfamiliar tent in the dark. This is exactly what happened to me. Not having a tent myself (the company provided me with one), I could only make acquaintance with the tent that I would call home for the next four nights exactly 15 seconds before I began to try pitching it. Luckily, my early teen years as a boy scout paid off and I managed to pitch the tent in a respectable amount of time, delayed only by the beers we were consuming and the curious lack of pegs I found accompanying my tent which forced me to re-plan my tent strategy a little more creatively (i.e. borrow some of Simon's pegs without him noticing). In any case, I fared better than some of the others. After quickly pitching his own tent, Simon decided to tackle Lotte's tent but quickly gave up because, evidently, five poles were too complicated to deal with (I agreed with him on this point, but only because I wanted him to come and explore he rest of the campsite with me instead of pitching other people's tent...even if it was the director's). There was, however, someone who had a worse time of it than Simon: Sim, one of our techies, succeeded in breaking our stage manager's tent after he'd put up his own, complete with lights and stereo system. I finally managed to drag Simon and Anna away from the tents to go and explore the rest of the campsite. There wasn't much to see really at that hour: some scattered tents, a couple of trucks and then...the toilets. I knew what they were as we approached them. I could feel my heart beating faster, my throat was dry, my stomach in a knot. Time seemed to slow down and I could hear my blood pulsing through my own veins. Everything else in the universe seemed to melt away into the darkness until all that existed in the known world was me and the bog and the distance between us. There was this force linking us, an invisible, unknown connection that was dragging me closer and closer towards them. Even from a distance, I instinctively knew they were the toilets. White portacabins close to the performers' bar. What else could they be? They also had a big sign saying 'toilets' next to them so that was a clue, but I still would have known. You know what? They seemed fine. They looked just like normal toilets, except that they were on a trailer. The relief was instant, rushing over me like a wave of...well, relief. A burden was lifted off my shoulders, I could see clearly, my head ached a little less, my smile grew a little wider. We were going to be ok. It was touch and go for a minute, but now I could rest and be happy and enjoy my life because I knew that whatever happens, we were going to be ok. I walked up to the bar to order a beer. I took a look at the price list. Maybe I spoke too soon.... |
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