Hot off the laptop so to speak, here below is a brief, rough and unedited extract from my forthcoming (& as yet untitled book about Glasto 2014. An early chapter of a work in progress...
Glasto had
decided to release a number of tickets early i.e. on the Thursday before the
main ticket sale Sunday, to those who bought combined coach and festival
tickets.
“Blimey,” I said
to Jackie, “That’s a bit unexpected, isn’t it?”
“Didn’t you know
they were going to do that?”
“No. You read it
all?”
“Yes,” she said,
“So what are you going to do?”
I shrugged.
“Dunno? What do you think?”
“It’s up to you.
You were going to drive but…”
“I know! If I
don’t try for those tickets and miss out on the Sunday then I’d be kicking
myself. It’s just coaches you know, Germany and all that?”
“That was ages
ago. It’ll be all different now.”
“Really? You
think?”
“Germany and all
that” referred to an experience seared into my memory like a very bad dream and
one that nearly thirty years on still is scarily memorable. We’d decided
sometime in the mid-1980’s that we needed a holiday, and preferably a cheap
one. This was just before we had a house, got married or had kids.
We were
therefore young and foolish. (As opposed to old and foolish, I guess.)
We
picked the cheapest holiday we could; 7 nights half board to Cologne for £59.
Including transport.
Coach.
My grasp on history isn’t that strong and I’m not
sure if the Berlin Wall had fallen by that stage, but I’m sure that the one
that was used to get us from Liverpool, across the Channel and half way into
Europe had been chartered from some East German coach firm, if not the Stasi
themselves. It wouldn’t have surprised me if there was a Trabant badge on the
front of the thing.
It took hours and hours to just get to Dover, stopping to
pick up people at every-God-forsaken place between Liverpool and the South
Coast. (I won’t name the places for fear of offending anyone, but you can make
a fair guess.)
I think that it broke down about 3 times just before we even got
to the ferry. The seats on the coach would have been made out of concrete, but
they managed to find a type of fabric that was slightly more uncomfortable.
This therefore, was our home for the nearly 40 hours it took us to get from
Liverpool to Cologne. (It managed to break down another 3 times before we
reached our destination.)
The journey was so long and uncomfortable that at
times I couldn’t actually remember having spent any time of my life outside of
the bus. The worst thing was that we knew we would have to make the same
journey in reverse just to get back home.
I was never a big Sex Pistols fan,
but cheap holidays in other people’s misery never sounded so true. I swore that
I’d never travel anywhere willingly by coach ever again.
All this should
hopefully explain my aversion to getting to Glastonbury by bus.
The finalised book should be out there in the wild by Christmas. It'll the third (and final) part of a trilogy. Like Lord of the Rings, but not as funny.
You can read/see/get the first two books here, either as Kindle books or as hold-in-your hand paperbacks:
"Turn Left at the Womble"
"Left Again at the Womble"
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