Best-of-all

A British summer time truly isn’t complete without a festival, and this year I chose to attend the best-of-all; Bestival! I’ve been attending a festival at least once a year for the past 8 years, making me quite the connoisseur of getting pissed up in a field and listening to rock music. As always, it’s the company that makes it; Camping out with friends is the highlight for me, the music is just an added bonus. I truly feel that this festival wasn’t the 'best-of-all' simply because of its quirky nature and seemingly endless supply of entertainment (and booze), but because it attracted a wide variety of people from a mixture of my friendship groups. The whole weekend I actually spent dotted between 5 different camps. It was quite a pain at times, because locating people at festivals is really not the easiest thing to do, but it suited well to my nomadic and care-free nature of being able to just dot about as I pleased. Plus if one group of friends weren’t going to see an act I wanted to see, or vice-versa, then I could just join on with another. That’s the benefit of having lots of friends :)

The best part for me, akin the most bizarre, was at the very end of the festival, during the final acts. Me and my amiga Sam, went to collect a bottle of water for the group as they danced around the main stage. We got sidetracked though and found ourselves being lured into a bizarre boot shaped house that had intrigued me quite a bit throughout the festival. We were the very last to enter; it was perfect timing, if not, dare I say, fate? Considering we ended up having our fortunes predicted within this quirky shaped house, then I guess it’s fair to dabble in the mysterious and say yes, it was fate.

Upon entry to the house, we were presented with a tall thin and dark room, full of boxes with horoscopes printed on them. Within each was a switch, which lit up respective star-sign alignments in LED lights on the ceiling. Following this we were led to an empty theatre, playing a short stop-motion film which was just, well, bizarre. The fun-house then led us up and on to a balcony fitted with telescopes pointed at the crowd of the main stage. People going crazy on the dance-floor thinking nobody was watching them were sadly mistaken. We tried to locate our chums but there were to many other drunken idiots to pick them out from.

We figured that was it, and began to make our way back down, until we noticed a small staircase leading further up the building. A couple were queuing in front of a mystic looking old woman. We had to produce a pun relating to our profession to gain entry - “I’m a plumber, but my business is going down the drain” - that sort of thing. Me and Sam supplied a sufficient but by no means good pun for our shared profession - “we’re architects, the business keeps on building up and up”.

Inside, this quirky old lady asked us to hold out our palms for our futures to be told. To which she simply laid a heat magazine upon them and read out our horoscopes - a pretty amusing gimmick. We then played a little game with the other couple in the room, where we had to draw the part of a person on a bit of paper, begin with the head, fold it over, pass it on, draw the next part of the body on the new fold and repeat. Until we finally had a mix-match caricature each. They were apparently our guardians for the evening, which ended up sending us on a wild goose chase later. Mine looked like a weird cross between a transvestite and the devil, wearing pumps, and when we met up with another friend of mine later that night, he just so happened to inform us of a secret transvestite act on that evening and a pursuit ensued. It ludicrous entertainment like that which makes festivals, especially Bestival, just such damn fun! Although the whole weekend may merge into a messed up blur of drunken stupendousness in my mind, it is moments like that last night which make such fantastic memories of it all.