I arrived at the Roskilde festival two days before the bands started playing. The way the festival works is people start lining up Saturday, getting let in around midnight when the fences are usually broken by the over excited mob. Activities and events start the next day, Sunday, but the 180 bands don’t start playing until Thursday, and you can’t access the main festival site until then. If you want to catch all the action you watch the last band on Sunday and stay until Monday. Usually a huge band closes the festival, this year Kraftwerk. So if you’re there from start to finish you’ve spent nine (9!) days on some field. This is awesome when you’re 18 and alcohol only hurts when you get it in your eyes, but when you’re 23 and have acquired certain bad habits from working in the possibly least manly business around, not so much.
So already after one day at the camp site watching old school mates inhale more alcohol in an hour than I had in the last year, I called my best friend in the world, my mum, to come and fetch me so I could get a shower, a square meal and a much appreciated night of sleep. Leaving the campgrounds defeated I promised I would return next day when the music started and shit got real.
Actually it was mainly the weather that forced me into submission. I am an absolute vagine when it comes to cold weather. I fucking hate it. I have touched on this before, but ever since I went from 95kg to 73kg I have been freezing my tits off pretty much whenever it dips below the twenties (68F for the yanks out there). I wasn’t up for spending another night in a sleeping bag wearing all my clothes, lying in foetal position trying to warm one hand in my armpit and the other in my junk. I try to touch those areas as little as possible when on a festival. Taken aback by the absence of enjoyment I once derived from that one annual week of debauchery, I had a somewhat worried outlook on the days I was to spend on those hallowed fields near one of Northern Europe’s oldest settlements, Roskilde.
(Stay tuned kids)
