Back in Black.

Okay. Now I'm back, and I am in black. I even changed my underpants and socks to ensure I would be totally in black, despite the fact that I had only been wearing them for a week and they didn't smell too bad.
That's how committed I am to be "Back in Black".
Because....
That is topical to the rant I am about to embark on.
My brother made me go to the Download festival at Castle Donington, probably remembered better by most people as Monsters of Rock.
The headline act were AC/DC.
First thing. I did a fair bit of walking about while we were there, and I never once saw a castle. So that was a rip-off straight away.
Next, when we got there they put this wristband on you that was impossible to remove (I'm still wearing it). I mean they might as well have issued you with a stripey pair of pyjamas with a six pointed star on them.
Then you went into what amounted to nothing more than a big field where you were expected to live for three days. To make matters worse, the big field was covered with people you didn't like.
And I mean covered. They were everywhere. The furthest away you could get from them was about 300mm.
They all seemed to be determined never to sleep, and to shout as loudly as possible in the middle of the night.
If I wasn't a pacifist, someone might have got hit.
Now here comes my AA Gill of the Sunday Times bit...
The food was utterly ghastly. Four pounds for a burger that looked like it wasn't particularly good to begin with, but had then been reversed over by a lorry.
More and more people appeared. The distance you were able to keep from them decreased to about 10mm.
Now, I rather naively, not having been to a festival before, thought that you would get out of your tent, and
there the bands would be.

How wrong I was. We had to walk so far that I was beginning to suspect that the show might actually be in a different country to the one we were camping in.

But we eventually got there, and after being practically strip-searched by nazis, they let us in to an area where the food was even more appalling and if you wanted a paper cup of beer you had to go through a process that was worse than USA immigration after September the Eleventh.

The organisers had obviously decided that everyone would like to listen to GWOAR! music early in the afternoon. So on came a succession of bands I had never heard of who played their guitars at a million miles an hour while someone who was clearly demented screamed unintelligable nonsense into a microphone. All well and good if you like that sort of thing, which I do, but I noticed some of the audience with looks of consternation on their faces, as if to say, "What's this?"

Finally, though, AC/DC came on, to a stage of their own construction, and made all the bad things go away.

I'm not even going to try to describe how good they were.

Then there were fireworks at the end and the march back to Auschwitz.

On the second day, after no sleep, due to the people I didn't like, who shouted at the top of their voices all night, I made a decision to break open some wine we had brought, and get roaring drunk. However, after a glass and a half, I abandoned this idea, as my brother surfaced from the tent and the idea came to me that it might be better to get out of this hell-hole and go to a nice little pub we had seen on our way in. It was walking distance away and looked like it might do food.

So this we did, and we we had a really nice lunch that hadn't been reversed over by a lorry, and the landlord and landlady, and the waiting staff were all really pleasant, and it was a nice break from the horror...the horror!

But we had to go back. I wanted to watch Rage Against the Machine that night.

My brother said he had never heard of them, but I suppose that's because he never went to art college in the mid-nineties, and he's a bit right wing.

You would think he would have known what to expect from a band called "Rage Against the Machine", but even I was shocked at the sight of a girl who can't have been more than six years old, sitting on her dad's shoulders giving a Black Power salute, and shouting, "FUCK YOU i WON'T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME!"
Modern parenting in action there, I suppose.

The last day came with the inevitable festival rain and mud, and us being middle-aged light-weights, we decided to retire to the tent for a couple of leisurely beers, on the grounds that we would have liked to see Motorhead and Aerosmith, but we didn't want to catch pneumonia doing it.
There's more to come on this subject, namely our packing up and leaving the site, but I think I will leave that for another time.

PS. When I said my brother is a bit right wing, I don't mean he's like a nazi or anything. He's just not a Pinko disestablishmentarianist like I am. In fact you could almost say he is an antidisestablishmentarianist, which is, by the way, the longest word in the dictionary.