Fear&Loathing In Hatfield

So, not so long ago I packed a bag, and took a trip to the continent, and for reasons better or worse, I felt like writing a little document detailing the things that occurred.

I promise no sense, chronological order, or well shot pictures to be included within this blog, merely a string of stories that I found disproportionately amusing compared to the rest of the sane world.

Tall James & I met up at Saint Pancras International train station around 7.10am. This was disgustingly early, and to say I was bleary-eyed when we met, would be a huge understatement. I was suffering ( Got up about 5.30am to start this journey into town) but my suffering was bearable, knowing the hideous inconvenience my gargantuan backpack was causing to the highly strung early morning commuters when going through narrow walkways and escalators. It made me crack a wry smile everytime someone tried a near athletetic manouvre to duck around me in their very shiny black shoes, oh so desperate to get to the office.

So anyway, after dousing our insides with some near nuculear temperature coffee, we proceeded to get into the Eurostar. Not too shabby, compared to the decrepid state of southeasterns rolling stock, but considering you have to pass through a certain level of gestapo-like border control to get anywhere close to these trains, I doubt many would be too eager to take their sharpies to the windows and tag them up, for fear of being taken out back to dig their own graves.

Long journey short, we popped through a tunnel, and rocketed through france, and came to stop at Brussels Midi Station. More akin to a large shopping center than a railway stop, this mecca of retail offered much nation themed chocolate, coffee, a huge TinTin murial, and general tourist crapola. I suppose it had too, because a few steps outside into the street of Brussels, and you realise it isn’t offering much. But more of that later, as we had took our investigation into the city a little more throroughly on the way back.

Wasting no time, we got on our connecting trains, heading towards where we were camping (it strikes me that I haven’t mentioned yet, but we were primarily abroad to go to Groezrock, self proclaimed as the worlds biggest punk festival). The sleepy little town of Meerhout. I was very impressed by the queing system some french people at the ticket office seemed to utilise, It was eerily familiar to the “just walk to the front and fuck everyone else” method, but with a little added pomposity. Grand.

So 2 more trains, a bus, and many confused looking Belgians later, we arrived in Meerhout. During the course of this trip, we had made a catalog of travelling errors, but at this point, we were feeling the effects of booking our travel to arrive 5 hours before any of our fellow Brit campers were due to arrive from Amsterdam.

Solution - some coke can sized ‘Jupiler’ lagers from the Eurospar.

So we sat on our miniature camping stools, and drank for a bit (well, 5 hours), in a small bit of grass outside a quiet residential area. At first I felt a bit rude and imposing, drinking but their own lager very quickly saw to this though, and very quickly felt part of the furniture, parked in the front garden of yet again, many a concerned looking Belgian.

The picture above is the first of 26 lovingly taken images from my superdrug disposable camera. Partly the reason I’ve put off writing this blog for so long is because I was waiting to get the film developed. We’re a little spoilt by the instant nature of the digital camera these days, and I did actually quite enjoy having to really think about how many exposures I was taking up every time I saw a stray dog or balloon, knowing there’s no re-takes. And there’s a lovely, grotty, grainy look to all these pictures too.

So on our epic wait for the northern contingent of our camping party to arrive, we drank some more, and noticed we were being surveyed, quite intently by one of the locals.

He/She (we forgot to check its privates) was a Jack Russel, that seemed to be roaming free around the area, no collar or owner in sight, behaving pretty well for a stray beast. We became increasingly amused by his seemingly pointless wandering around us, but came to the conclusion that this was probably where he usually came to use the toilet, and was suffering from stagefright from the two increasingly less sober men plonked out on his usual patch.

The northeners turned up, and we marched ourselves down the road to the campsite, and proceeded to be held up by the belgians bizzare tent placing system (involving about 20 stewards, a long piece of rope, and walking backwards very slowly every so often) I can’t really explain to you how the system worked, because quite frankly, it didn’t. It resulted in about 400 people camping ontop of one another. Multi-storey tents are not something that people are ready to cometo terms with yet.

Eventually, we got the tent set up, and cracked open another beer. Domestic Bliss. Particularly enjoyable, as we had a “pop-up” tent, so we we were set up within about 3 minutes, and goto to enjoy seeing the others…struggle a little.

Here’s another reason why I love disposable cameras. This picture looks fucked, and as if fancy filters were in use, without a shitty iphone app.

So with the music not actually starting until the next day, there was little else to do, other than drink, and that we did, until the early hours of the night. Since coming back i’ve enjoyed seeing the many different, and ridiculous photos of myself emerge on facebook, from the perspective of other peoples cameras.

I was apparantly too fucked to operate the simple click mechanism of my disposable camera at this time. Before heading into the campsite, I made the wise bulk-buy of all the beer I’d want for the weekend, 3 crates between 2 people. Sensible. Unfortunately we drank them all that friday night.

Fast-forward to saturday morning, and I wake up around 7am, with a feeling akin to what I beleive having a dagger covered with sandpaper rammed through your forehead would be like. I was dry as bone, we had no water in the tent, and was hanging badly. The state of my gut and bladder was dubious. There was no other option than to try and find the campsite toilets. I bravely stepped out into a foreign land.

No time to change out of my pyjamas. I threw my feet into some converse, put on the sunglasses and started to crawl towards my destination. I tried to keep my eyes as closed as possible, suspending disbeleif that I was awake, I had done this damage to myself, that the sun was out, and it also served the secondary purpose of not seeing the assumd stares of other people at the state of this pyjama’d zombie man staggering forward in the mud.

I eventually got there, did my business, swigged some water and headed back to the tent to try and get some more sleep, in much the same manner.

My brain was not at full capacity, and not really ready for what happened next. Found the red pop-up tent, opened it up. Only to see there was not just James lying there asleep, but instead two men. Some bastard was in my sleeping bag! I couldn’t fathom what was happening. I closed the door, stood up straight and tried to piece together what had occurred. I then bent down again, opened up the door, and croaked out “what’s going on?!” No response, both these people were clearly asleep. I stood up once more, and then it struck me. Although identical to my tent. This was not my tent. There was a gazebo nearby to it, as there was one to my tent. But about 50m further down the campsite, i could see that gazebo.

I was some bizzare, alcohol burnt guy in his pyjamas, trying to demand entry into 2 Belgian mens’ tent. At this point my brain was at the most heightened state of panic that my hungover situation would allow. I closed that tent, and scarpered like an olympic athlete. I am still very thankfull, and consider myself lucky, these two people, of whom I invaded their tent, didn’t wake up, assume me a thief, pervert or aviator-wearing murderer, and proceed to beat the living crap out of me.

I went back to sleep for quite a while.

After waking up again, still extremely hanging, I recounted the tales of foolishness to the others, and went to buy junk food from EuroSpare. CROKY Hula Hoops were my saviour. I ate about 3 of these giant bags during my stay. All different flavours, yet all tasted pretty much identical.

After recovering a little, I remembered more from the night before. Although the actual music part of the festival didn’t start till the saturday, we heard of their being a “campsite acoustic stage”. Someone that the group knew was playing, so we headed out. I was slightly bemused when i discovered our destination was the toilets, and the campsite acoustic “stage” was infact a small rabble of people crowded round a performer on some beer crates, next to (then later inside) the small tent where earlier in the day staff were giving out toilet paper to those in need of the facilities. Not being able to hear anything, coupled with the ever present waft of fecal smell from the nearby portaloos made me push for our stay in this toilet annex area to be cut short, and we headed to the far more sensible “party tent”

Sadly however, my memories of this place limited due to the gallons of cheap belgian lager I consumed

Fingers are tired of typing now, I might carry on with the rest of the weekend, when I find the time, although entertaining, It was far more sober than the first section

wunderbar2:

instead of learning from my mistakes i like to dwell on them until i have a panic attack.

(excuse the content, i am far too tired to proof-read tonight) So so so so. Let’s talk about university.

Hey students, do you want to know why you have to pay tuition fees now? It’s because there’s far too many of you. Plain and simple. When there was a very small slice of the population attending university, society as a whole could afford to subsidise the costs of a few pursuing further education, in return for what graduates would inevitably put back into the economy later.

But sadly, now that half the school leaving population has been seduced into thinking it’s uni or bust, the taxman can’t afford the burden of supporting you all for 3 years. especially as most of you are doing degrees in studying David Beckham, you’re not going to end up with a job where you’ll be walloping it back into the taxmans pocket in later life.

I don’t think we even know what we’re doing anymore. It’s as if University courses are now just an extension of compulsory education, everyone’s now in till they’re 21, because we’ve screwed up the school system something filthy, and at 18, these half baked wonders are definitely not ripe to being turfed out onto the streets. Stick them back into the oven for 3 years, a degree will sort them out.

The nature of degrees has really changed. Rather than taking in a degree in a field, engineering, maths, biology, literature, we have several very well meaning vocational courses appearing, which seems a shame, as education really should be for educations sake, the quest for knowledge, rather than building a sly tailored cv.I thought that was more of what a college was for. What really really sucks, is that i did a music technology degree. quite vocational, taiolered for a narrow group of jobs. I’m betting 80% of the people i graduated with are not doing jobs related to music or sound. What is university doing trying to do college courses, but charging 8x the price, and failing at making their students employable

Have you ever met anyone at a party and thought “you are biege. the dull-ness eminating out of you is sucking the life force out of my party spirit.”
These uninspirational, unintentional party-poopers are very content to sit there, reel out a little bit of pleasant small talk, make some twee jokes with their also so very biege partner and generally…not make a whole lot of commotion. Then why the hell does it upset me so much? Jelousy, probably. They’re just happy. Sickeningly happy, not for any particular reason, but they’re just content. they are plodding on with life, dopey smile on their faces, saying how funny Top Gear was. (it definitely wasn’t). but they are happy, with an unwaivering consistancy. They’re not wasting their evening writing an angsty, pointless blog post about it either. These boring couples are just living their lives, one spag-bol and shit sitcom at a time.

I tried to reason it out, make myself feel better about the fact that I haven’t just settled. Tried to do things a little differently, made sacrifices for my work and passions at the expense of relationships, friendships and a good chunk of sanity, as well as giving me the complexion of a man about double my age. It was at this point I unavoidably had to consider- is ambition just unhappiness? At the moment they just seem synonymous. What would motivate you to graft through to the next level, if it wasn’t for lack of being content with where you are. Someone who’s completely happy with their supremely ultimate chair, probably isn’t going to go out and seek the new super vibrating model. It doesn’t make sense.
I have considered myself ambitious for most of my adult life, and it has succeeded in driving me further. But where the hell has it left me, and where am I going, if at no stage I’m not able to experience the sheer drooling glee of a simpleton listening to Clarkson being a bit racist. And yet at the same time, i’ve got no inclination to dumb myself down, start settling for less, forcing myself to be just hunky-dorey with where i’m at. What does this mean? who knows. Guess i’m just a glutton for misery.