Malone is not friends with tents

I want to go to a festival, but I don’t want to go to a festival. I like the idea of lolling in a field to great music but would the reality be me spending hundreds of pounds to basically be on hyper-alert for 72 hours. “Where’s my child?!” Oh phew, she’s over there, just playing with cider-cans and fag butts whilst some nipple-tassled women in fairy costumes dance around her singing Ke$ha. No, not for me. Not relaxing. For me, festivals represent a time when I turn off the computer and phone. A time to absorb my annual intake of vitamin D and that special rare outdoors oxygen stuff. Maybe this is why the tickets are £200, it’s not to pay for 20 bands you might see, but the 72 hours oxygen therapy sleeping under the stars. It’s the sleeping bit that concerns me. Tents are not my friends. One year we awoke to being flooded inside the tent, and last year we borrowed a tent so small we had to sleep with our feet outside. I refused to not use the inflatable mattress, it took up the whole tent; every-time my boyfriend turned over in his sleep the bounce ripple catapulted me up and down… I’m not a professional camper, I will not be making my own cups of tea on a burner. No I will queue with morning tufty hair like everyone else who refuses to carry kitchen sinks. I don’t drive, so carrying a tent, a sleeping bag and 2-ply is quite enough to manage.

“THIS is the kind of woman who makes homemade chips at a festival”

I remember one year my friend fried her own chips! Who makes homemade chips at a festival?! My friend Rachael. Rachael is the kind of woman who pre-children, would always without fail, fall asleep at a party only to awake later to swig on a beer/breakdance/fall back asleep. Luckily her boyfriend is exactly the same. If Barney and Rachael weren’t cocooned in a corner of a party by midnight it wasn’t a good party. THIS is the kind of woman who makes homemade chips at a festival. Championing the long lost art of homemade chips must have been exhausting. At £200 a ticket maybe I might have to take potatoes and oil to survive. To hire a tipi, I estimate the total cost of festival experience at about £700. Who spends that kind of money on a festival? I mean I like to have a conversation at a dinner party about what I’ve been up to, but I’d rather spend £800 on a holiday abroad, than endure mud, flat cider, and swaying to artists who sound better on my iPod and the constant looking round for my child! I’ve never taken taken my child to a festival, I think it would be stressful, constantly shouting: “STAY where I can SEE you!” And “hold Mummy’s hand, mummy is a bit wobbly and needs a lie down….”