Festival survival: don’t forget wellies and a bicycle pump
The Sunday Times yesterday published its Festival Guide - giving handy hints to anyone planning to attend one of the major music events this Summer. The summary to survival it seems: “as long as you remember wellies, some sort of rain mac and sunscreen, you’ll be fine” (for a full run-down on survival tips, including why you need a bicycle pump, read the full article by Rebecca Nicholson).
To anyone that went to Glastonbury in 2005, the year the camp sites were wiped out by flash floods, this is surely sound advice. And even if the forecast is for sunny weather don’t leave things to chance. Festival Medical Services, a charity which provides medical services at Glastonbury, has 13 festival podiatrists seeing up to 90 cases of Trench Foot a day. Most cases involve someone who came in trainers or walking boots, who got their feet wet and continued to wear their soggy footwear.
As luck would have it, wellies are actually at the cutting edge of fashion design these days - you can buy them in a massive selection of colours and patterns, and even nowadays with a wedge heel if you don’t like flat shoes - so there’s absolutely no excuse for not taking a pair! In fact, wellies and festivals are so ‘hand-in-hand’ these days that the TV advert for the Sunday Times Festival guide was in fact a sequence of welly photographs - as simple as that.
The message is quite clear, and every Festival Guide, forum and hardened festival-goer out there will tell you the same thing - if you’re off to a festival this year, simply don’t go without your wellies.