Imagine you haven’t slept more than two hours a night for three days because towering soundsystems in every direction send thundering bass lines through the ground towards your sleeping bag. You can see your breath, because in this part of the world, the temperature drops to the dew point at night in the height of summer. You are in a tent. The insides of the polyurethane single sheet are dripping onto your dirty face.
Your face is muddy and your hair grimy. The nearest toilet consists of a metal cube, ten metres long, with a row of seats floating above a swirling Sargasso Sea. Showers boast hour-long line-ups. Sleep is a laughable ambition.
On every side of your tent, sprawling several hundred metres towards the horizon, are tents. And tents. And tents. All filled with similarly exhausted people, who have opted to spurn snooze for whisky and loud, confused conversation.
Your phone is dead. Your friends are nowhere to be seen. The noise is getting louder. Suddenly you realize one of your rubber boots is missing—presumably lost amid the rivers of mud meandering through the area.
And you never, ever, want to go home.
Read the full story in the Toronto Standard about the strange experience of the English music festival, a five-day endurance test of rain, music, chemicals and costumes, and check out my photo gallery of snaps of drunk brits having fun.