Too Old for this Shit

As dawn approached on the fourth day, Mike lay gasping in his ten quid tent – a sagging neon pyramid fashioned from a revolutionary fabric which seemed to keep oxygen out and suck water in, and which somehow rendered light brighter on the inside than in the world beyond, meaning daybreak fried his eyeballs as he lay there lamenting, lamenting – a middle aged man boiled in a bag and steaming cider from every pore. Three days and nights of burgers and scrumpy had left him with thick-shake guts and fantasies of porcelain.

“I’m too old for this shit,” his cracked lips rasped.

Outside, he could hear the chatter of mostly younger people, their words not quite audible – or perhaps it was simply a tongue beyond his grasp – a language made of the same words he used but given new meanings. A laugh here, a rant there, and every now and then a whisper, a… “go on!” And do what, Mike wondered? His nephew had been to Reading and he’d heard its animals would burn tents in the night. Mike felt like a man on Safari, as shadows moved across his tent and somewhere close wild beasts growled.

Zzzzzzziiiiiiiiiiiiiiipp went the zip on his tent.

“Morning Mikey, how’s the head?” said his sister Rose.

“You scared the fucking life out of me!” said Mike. “Thought the little raving savages had come for me.”

“Have a swig of this, lightweight” said Rose. “Come on. We’re not done yet.”

They trudged along a path to where fast food stalls opened towards a large stage with a canopy shaped, Mike thought, rather like a helmet. They’d seen a few bands there yesterday, he thought, or was it on another stage? It all looked different in the emptier dawn. Most of the bands had been OK – though not patch on his day when, after all, you were talking the originals. It was all recycled now – Nu this, post that – he wondered if there were any moulds left to break or if they’d just go round and round from here on in, like a needle on a 45.

Mike and Rose paused on the edge of a muddy plain to behold an apocalyptic vision of dawn: steam rising from a million tents, litter scattered by a hundred thousand locusts, five thousand revellers still moving slowly through the mire, some just up, some off to bed, some rushing on a rumour to an end of night event. On Rose and Mikey strode, through a field lined with monsters twisted from the carcasses of cars, through trees hung with giant plastic butterflies and fresh paper lanterns which flickered in the darker light beneath the boughs – reminding Mike of a Sargent painting: Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.

They emerged onto a slope, tasting smoke which drifted across their path from campfires around which people talked and strummed and sat and stared, faces warmed by the rising sun which looked like it might dry the earth, given a chance. There were a lot of ponchos and woolly hats in evidence, and crushed cans and dirty faces and eyes not ready to close, and a woman selling mushrooms from a basket over her arm, and men who slipped things into the palm of your hand, and people who danced on the spot to tunes in their heads and others who slept where they had fallen. People stood and watched as the sun rose, flooding the beautiful carnage with heightened light, and Mike felt suddenly like he’d walked through the back of the wardrobe, out of the Acme festival of identikit tents and bands and into a ragged land a million light years from home.