Countdown to Glastonbury! It’s all going a bit Shangri La La.....

Oh my God, have you SEEN the news about the new venues for this year?! They sound amazing – basically, this year Trash City is being replaced with Block 9, The Common and the Unfair Ground, three exciting new spaces of weirdness. Block 9, not for the faint hearted apparently, hosts the NYC Downlow which is a life size ruin of a tenement building and home to all kinds of debauchery and devilment. Not only that, there is also the London Underground, which is ‘a sinister, decaying tower block with a blazing tube train bursting from the top’. Mental.

The Common sounds a bit like a cross between Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley and the kind of circus / fair you would find in your worst nightmares. Can’t wait! Where else can you play ‘Hook-A-Head’ and watch motorcyclists hurtle around the 18 foot Wall of Death?

The Unfair Ground is home to the latest offering from The Mutoid Waste Company (formerly responsible in the main for Trash City). What have they produced this year, I hear you ask! Well, a nightclub which is a cross between an RAF helicopter and a praying mantis of course! There is also the Unnatural History Museum and the Acid House, which is fronted by Happy Mondays very own Bez.

Too much! And that’s just a tiny picking of what’s on offer. How does one prioritise one’s festival timetable? No idea. I’m kind of in the mind set just to let it happen randomly, take each day / hour as it comes because I know from experience that planning too strictly often ends in disappointment. Last year, a group of us attempted to make it to Trash City on two nights, and ended up being herded along with about 50,000 other people who had the same idea, all walking a less that one mile per hour shoulder to shoulder. It.Was.Very.Unpleasant.

I always toy with the idea of staying away from the main stages to make the most of all the incidental offerings that are going on everywhere else. This year though, Muse and Faithless at least will lure me to the Pyramid, so bang goes that idea. I will also be working some of the time as a steward and also in journo mode with a press pass (hurrah!) so that’s gonna be another thing to factor in. Meeting up with friends whenever possible to meander is another plan, though have at least 8 to hang out with this year, all of which also working odd shifts so not easy to plan around. I’d better sleep and eat a bit as well at some point. Actually, now I come to think of it, I may be able to be spontaneous with my festival sight seeing for about twenty minutes on Friday morning. Hmmm…..

Oh whatever. It will be fine! I shall make a list of three things I have to do that I have never done before at Glastonbury and stick with that. Not fall over would be one good one as I have, without fail, fallen over at every festival I have ever been to. Last year I fell over on the very last night, by kicking what I thought was an empty plastic bottle by the Other Stage and finding it was probably the only bottle on site that had been oddly filled with concrete (felt like it) and ended up not only falling over but breaking my toe as well.

Shangri La. Never been. Am ashamed. Too Lazy. Promise to change. Will go.

Am going to randomly select something to do now…..am looking at festival website….…..am going to shut my eyes, hover the cursor over the list of areas and click…..when I open my eyes, I see which area it will be…….ok, ready……….Field of Avalon… *thinks about cheating* ok, best out of three (no idea how this will work)…..The Unfair Ground…that’ll do! Ok, now am going to repeat stupid act over entire UG page…….ok………tada! Am going to ‘get down with the robots in Reverend Sharky's Church Of The Holyroller’. Okey dokey then, that’s that sorted! When should I go? Not a clue.

So that’s my festival timetable then. Work, write, sleep, eat, not fall over, go to Shangri-la, Muse, Faithless and get down with the robots. Sounds like a plan….