One-Way Ticket To The Big Chill

United Kingdom | 09 August 2006

No car. Check. Buses full. Check. Train extortionately priced. Check. Let down last minute by lift. Check. Desperate to return to The Big Chill. Check.

And so it is, cruising along the M4 with my girlfriend towards The Big Chill that the reality sets in of the weekend’s eventual task in hand. Armed with only one-way tickets via the National Express (all the buses back to London on Monday are full), early morning thoughts converge on how the hell we’ll ever get back.

Arriving at the site, a bus supervisor draped in a yellow fluorescent jacket hints at the possibility of a couple of spare seats back, but insists we keep it a “worst case scenario”. Fortunately, Eastnor Park, the stunning home of The Big Chill festival, pronounces itself as a ‘site of scientific interest’, instantly boosting the prospects of my own scientific project; surely if hoards of urbane revellers are invited back, year after year, after trashing parkland reserved for scientific study, then it must logically follow that my quest to get home will be a simple given in comparison. Is that scientific? I certainly thought so at the time.

Once through the gate, however, I realise this festival is far more equipped and organised than I could ever be. Signs everywhere blare out the ‘Leave No Trace’ ecological message, recycling bags for different types of rubbish are obligatorily thrust into eager hands in exchange for tickets, and, what’s more, people look as if they’re actually into it. I overhear one passer-by scowl at another for flicking a fag on the ground, lecturing in her Big Chill accent that every single discarded butt has to be picked up when the festival comes to an end. It makes me wonder if that principle will apply to me.

The challenge in not having a lift home at the end of a festival is an interesting paradox. On the one hand, you don’t want to waste your weekend worrying about your 100-mile-plus journey back to civilisation when you’ve made such a concerted effort to escape it in the first place. But at the same time, you don’t want to leave it until the last minute when you will inevitably come over desperate, possibly threatening, and definitely someone who clearly takes no responsibility for their own welfare whatsoever. It’s all about knowing when to make your move.

The first of these opportunities comes earlier than expected. Upon entering the camp site, we meet a group of happy campers who offer us an olive branch home. However, waving our grateful goodbyes, smiling awkwardly yet visibly relieved, one of them apologises for being “totally trashed” and flashes me a farewell gurn just to prove it. Slightly confused, I take this as a thinly veiled warning that, despite such open generosity, there’s a chance this misguided promise may never actually manifest itself beyond drugged-up goodwill. It dawns on me then, that pledges of transport on the Friday may, by Sunday, be about as solid as the contents of Andy’s Loos – or, indeed, Andy’s rivals here, Betta Toilets, who are no Betta for the record.

Nonetheless, the ‘I haven’t got a lift home’ conversation proves a great way of getting to know people. Friday night in Lost Vagueness and we’re offered dozens of return options back down the M4 by new found friends. “My mate’s got a combie, it’s red, just go see him Monday morning, say you know me, Paul, and he’ll definitely take you.” Sweaty pledges such as these, however, seem almost overly generous and do not fill me with much confidence, especially as many of these characters have those ‘trust in me’ eyes like that snake from Jungle Book. They do at least show, though, that these Big Chillers are Big Givers at heart, too.

Of course, I can’t talk when it comes to vague, often empty words. As the night expands from sunny adult playground into its inevitable shrouded madness, I begin to scare people. It seems that once darkness sets in the code dictates you should get to know potential car buddies a bit better before launching into your sales pitch. Telling a random guy you love him more than your girlfriend just because he knows one of your jokes apparently isn’t very Big Chill. It fails, so I decide to wait for first light before resuming my quest for car space.

Saturday is brimming with possibilities. Generous children wander around offering biscuits from a tin. “If only they could drive .. their parents might.” Three DJs, The Bored Housewives, rock the Finlandia cocktail bar and invite wobbly revellers up to the decks to mix a record – “They seem like the type who’d actually enjoy taking us home.” A lone, middle aged woman knits a grey jumper – “Surely a sign of unrepentant kindness?” Arrested Development play an impromptu set on the main stage – “Didn’t they used to buy shoes for homeless people?” Charity stalls are spread throughout the site – “Charity begins at home, doesn’t it? Exactly where we need to be getting to Monday.”  

But it’s a long day and homeward cares gradually fade as they’re gently bent by the sun and simultaneously seduced by alcohol. There’s a different vibe in the air too, with free-flowing beats, sun-tinged smiles and colours of sound dissolving any sense of geographical isolation. This is no time to start putting pressure on the lovely people here to get me back to Brixton - that would just ruin the taste of their overpriced cocktail pitchers. I decide that Sunday will be the best context for our Great Escape and we celebrate by getting wasted.

Later, we meet a kitsch club kid, old enough to know better, dressed in a red and silver space suit and carrying a toy gun. He spends the evening shooting himself in the head and falling over, rolling round in the dirt calling for his 'daddy', who has apparently deserted him somewhere at the festival. I realise, here and now, that my plight is nothing in comparison to this confused creature and all efforts are switched into trying to find a way to get our new friend 'home', in every sense of the word.

Sunday and it’s difficult to move. People seem taller too. We decide that today is the day to invest heavily in food. Hopefully, various visits to various food stalls as foil for reinvigoration will also find us salvation in a return ticket. A ride home with a food stall owner, we decide, would be a fitting conclusion – yes, very Big Chill indeed. Yet the bright, yellow snare of Cornelius Cob puts an instant end to this romantic theory. It seems you can even go wrong with corn on the cob by Sunday. Disappointed, I seek solace in a mound of Caribbean food, full of taste and sultanas, before chatting to the owner who says he’ll happily give us a lift home, just not until 4am tonight once the main arena has shut down. I thank him, and bank it as a possibility.

Before we know it our luck’s in big time. We bump into two people I know, both of whom offer us a lift once our plight is explained to them for the thousandth time. One car leaves late-ish this evening, while the other departs very early tomorrow morning. Satisfied that all is well in the world we rejoin our friends in front of the Ukulele Orchestra Of Great Britain and unwind ourselves into the greenery of the rolling Herefordshire hills. 

Waking up when it’s dark is always an eerie feeling. Waking up in your tent when you know you shouldn't be there is a lot worse. The plan had been to have a little lie-down in between afternoon and evening. Coming to at 9.30pm was not part of the plan at all. Of course, we should have got up there and then and joined the closing Sunday evening party for the likes of Rob Da Bank, Guilty Pleasures and Mr Scruff. Of course, we don’t and instead opt got the ‘let’s just have another five minutes option.’ Waking up later at 4am at a festival is frankly horrible, not to be recommended, especially when you’ve missed two of your three lifts as well as potentially the best action of the entire weekend. The blustery mocking of the wind and rain do little to ease the melancholy.

And so, inevitably, Monday morning arrives with mild anxiety, aching limbs, damp belongings and no idea of how to get home. We quickly pack up, in between berating ourselves for how useless we are, then head to the car park to find lift number three. Perhaps deserved of such fate, lift number three is nowhere to be seen. The car park is scoured and drivers are hollered at half-heartedly, floppy thumbs and weird facial pulls doing little to encourage our forged attempts at familiarity. Passengers return our looks of defeat through back-windows, clearly horrified by the mere prospect of having two more sewer smelling creatures occupying their vehicle. Others make excuses, while some just look ahead, firmly focused on baths and burger kings. As I remember the raft of opportunities I'd encountered over the weekend, hope, like the rain, begins to wane. Where are your 'friends' when you most need them, ey?

For some reason, however, we still don't seem to care. We've still got a few fags. I check a watch, 9.40am, the buses leave at 10. Remembering our worst case scenario we scurry over to where the buses depart from, along with several other hundred hopefuls. What transpires is a half hour wait of nervous cigarettes smoking and psychic praying to the guy in the fluorescent yellow jacket directing the show, a man who wields levels of power he cannot ever possibly understand. Master over the four angelic carriages marked ‘London’, he explains that all of them are full but that we might possibly be able to get on a standby coach. It stands much smaller and suspiciously marked 'Gloucester'. With no money left, we can only hope that our one-way ticket will be enough if such a miraculous outcome ensues. Unbelievably, it is - and it does.

Perhaps it’s an anti-climax that the one-way ticket proved to go two-ways, that the worse case scenario happened to be the best case - but not for me. Public transport has long hampered, hindered and harangued my progress in this world. Never has it proved to be anything beyond a depressing after-thought to getting somewhere nice. It has almost always let me down at some stage of the journey.

However, for four consecutive years, The Big Chill has done exactly what's it's said it will do. It has inspired, excited and exposed me to all sorts of things, too countless to mention. So I like the fact that The Big Chill ultimately stranded me, that when it was all over it didn’t quite know how to deal with my lack of planning, that once beyond the threshold of safety the hoards of Big Chillers would rather eat their own legs than give me a lift home.

Because despite asking for a lift back to London on dozens of occasions, I never really asked at all. Not once was my request ever backed up by times or places or details and never did I make a real effort to sort things out. The Big Chill isn't meant to get you home, it's meant to suck you in and spit you out and then it's left to someone else to mop you up - like our flourescent yellow National Express man. Because like the thousands of fag butts scattered all over Eastnor Park, every single one of us has got to be dealt with at the end. 'Leave No Trace' indeed.