Monday 25th August, 2003

I have had an hour-long bath but there is still dirt under my fingernails and the smell of stale campfire smoke won’t go. Why won’t it go? I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired. I plan on staying up until 9 pm, then sleeping for 16 hours. That should do it. If I go to bed this afternoon, I’ll mess myself up. Like I did after I’d stayed up all night at Matthew Cook’s sleepover when I was 10. I got home, started crying because I was so exhausted, and went to bed in the afternoon. In the early evening, I sleepwalked downstairs to the kitchen and mistook our pantry for a toilet. Fortunately, my brother stopped me before I pissed over all our food but he still reminds me of this on an unnecessarily regular basis.

This was the second time I’ve been to Leeds Festival. Last year, I went for the day with Rich. I didn’t know him particularly well at the time so it’s a bit odd that we went as a pair. When The Offspring played “Pretty Fly for a White Guy,” I got overexcited and went crowd-surfing. I was wrestled over the barriers by a giant security guard to realize that I’d lost my phone, wallet, keys and Rich. This was not pretty fly at all.

After anxiously pacing around for an hour and a half, I bumped into Rich outside a van selling noodles. This was to my immeasurable relief. What would I have done otherwise? Miss Guns ‘n Roses and walk the 12 miles home? It doesn’t bear thinking about.

After the music, we reconvened with some pals who had full weekend tickets back at the campsite and managed to secure accommodation for the night; a vacant tent provided by a stoned but hospitable character called Quinny. My dad picked us up the next morning and Rich was feeling nauseous. Too embarrassed to ask my dad to pull over, he was sick in his rucksack and threw it out of the car window.

This year, a group of around twenty of us went for the full three days. The timing of Leeds Festival is perfect as we’d picked up our GCSE results on Friday. Whether you got the grades you were after or flunked completely, there is a market for Carling, Aftershock and System of a Down, isn’t there? I was content with my results, all A to C, although I was disappointed with the B in Art. My pastel masterpiece of Tupac Shakur must have been misinterpreted by the examiners.

My dad had been to Safeway and bought me enough food to last the weekend. This was very kind, however, within hours of arriving and setting up our tents, I’d mistaken my carrier bags of food for litter and pissed all over them. While this week’s blog may suggest otherwise, I do not regularly piss on, or attempt to piss on, food. As far as I’m aware, the two mentioned examples are the only times it has happened.

It was a tremendous weekend, although much of it is a blur. We drank a lot of Carling. System of a Down put on a good show but they had to stop playing halfway through the set because a woman had somehow got her leg trapped under a metal barrier in front of the stage and was screaming in agony. God knows how she’d managed that. I hope she’s okay. She didn’t look okay.

Metallica were headlining the first night and, having recently mastered the opening riff to “Nothing Else Matters,” on the guitar, I was keen to get a good view. As they walked onto the stage, we began sprinting towards the front. In doing so, I unintentionally kicked a man who was sitting down on the grass plumb in the head. He was a middle-aged metal head with facial piercings and didn’t take kindly to this, jumping up and shouting obscenities at me. I spluttered a weak apology but he looked ready to kill me so I ran away into the crowds, feeling both terrified and guilty as “Enter Sandman,” began.

On the Saturday, I found myself alone with my pal Rodney. I had spent all my money and Rodney only had £10 left for the weekend. We still had two crates of warm Carling back at the tent, but we were struggling for nourishment. Rodney kindly offered to split his cash with me and we were discussing the best way to stretch it. Loafs of bread and a tin of tuna?

“I’ve got it,” Rodney said.

He marched over to a charity stall and returned with two fake leather jackets.

“Thanks man.”

Although we couldn’t eat them the leather jackets gave us a new lease of life and we had a terrific evening watching Blink 182 and Linkin Park and attempting to dance with girls who did not seem impressed by our dress sense.

There was a packet of dry pasta back at the campsite so we managed to survive until Sunday when we watched Blur through bleary eyes before riots kicked off. Fires, shouting, swarms of crowds pushing, shoving, fights breaking out. It was mental. I pretended I was having fun to look cool but I wasn’t having fun at all. I was petrified. It was apocalyptic.

I woke up this morning in our stinking tent with rain pattering on the canvas. Rodney, Luke and I couldn’t face packing up the tent and decided that a fitting final act would be to kick it from the inside until it was destroyed. We were delirious and had gone a bit mad by now. While I was sad that this wild, rites-of-passage weekend was over, I was also relieved and I’m looking forward to returning to some semblance of normality. Living off Carling and two hours’ sleep per night is not sustainable. Who knew?

We packed up our stuff and went to find Dan and some other mates as we were going to get the bus back together. Dan said he was going to leave his tent because someone had taken a shit in it.

I don’t know if I’ll go back to Leeds Festival next year.

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