Una Mullally: Forget summer festival Fomo and look at the negatives

You could be forgiven for thinking you were a subspecies if you don’t go to festivals in the summer. Media and consumerism pivot to focus almost solely on people in fields. Festival season clogs up every article, and “and finally . . . ” news report. The middle aisle at Lidl becomes populated with self-erecting yurts. Your children take drugs. You listen to bands you pretended to know when the line-up was announced.

Everything just goes to hell for the summer. And it’s fantastic. Festivals interrupt reality and create their own. It’s play time. This summer, for the first time since I turned 18, my summer will be festival-less. Doctor’s orders. I’m staring at November on the calendar, when I might get to the Airwaves festival in Reykjavik (I hope the doctors aren’t reading this) with the crazed desire of a starved lynx eyeing an injured chamois.

There are different categories of festivals, of course. I’ve never been able to figure out what summer schools actually are, aside from a vague sense they’re a covert auditioning programme for Marian Finucane’s round-table radio show on Sunday.

There are the gardening festivals which, from a distance, seem to be the nicest of them all. I like garden centres, so can only assume a whole festival of plants and flowers is an amplified version of those. Gardeners, for some reason, are also the target market for the type of gadget clutter I enjoy, which straddles the DIY-homeware-aspirational spectrum. A device that makes courgettes into spaghetti. Lamps that look like jam jars. People who like looking at flowers are calm folk.

In Japan, a similar activity is called hanami, the custom of deriving pleasure from the cherry blossoms. One appreciates their beauty, along with the very Japanese subtext of recognising their transience and, thus, the transience of everything.

I was driving through Meath the other week and saw a sign for Moynalty Yoga Festival. So there are yoga festivals too, right there, in the Kerala of Leinster.

I don’t like comedy festivals. Seeing one stand-up performance after another doesn’t do the form any favours. Instead of intelligent, rambling comedy that takes time to brew, you get one-liners shorter than tweets, a barrage of gags that are to the art of comedy what popping fizzy cola bottle after fizzy cola bottle into your mouth is to the culinary arts. Quick hits that leave you with sore teeth and a mild sense of regret.

The best festivals are music festivals. Or rather the “music and . . . ” festivals. Music and culture. Music and performing arts. Music and stuff. Given that the media effectively hates you if you don’t buy an early-bird ticket, refurbish an airstream trailer and start considering peyote, I’ve never realised how bloody annoying all of this is until I couldn’t go. So I’ve decided to focus on the negatives.

Nothing is good about sleeping in a tent, or spending any time whatsoever in a tent. Nothing. They are specifically designed to make you think, when you wake up with a hangover, that during the night, while sleeping off that bad-idea-Buckfast, you must have been smuggled into a polyester oven to atone for your hedonism.

On Monday morning the tents are so resented that people just walk away from them, abandoning the nylon ghost estate like broken victims of recession handing back the keys.

Festival fashion is people mimicking what they expect others would wear to a festival while going to a festival themselves. This kind of thing is now referred to as “meta”, previously “post”, but is really just shorthand for “we’re all doomed”, like the success of another Kardashian, or the invention of a pizza crust made from cheeseburgers.

The once practical vestiges of festival attire, for example Wellington boots, are appropriated so that their purpose – keeping feet dry – is rendered meaningless for the sake of “the look”, resulting in leaky plastic boots with floral designs evoking Cath Kidston. What is especially curious about festival fashion is the cultural theft it involves. Every couple of years a new culture is appropriated for the ravenous early-20s market. It used to be the ceremonial headdress of Native Americans, now it’s a decorative bindi. Festival-goers? Bunch of cultural thieves.

Food is overpriced and portions are too small. There is mud. Leaving Glastonbury last year after five days, I saw a young woman struggling with crutches and her leg in a cast. She had broken it over the weekend after getting stuck in particularly heavy mud. She went to walk forward, but her leg didn’t come with. Snap.

And when festivals are actually on, the media reports on them with the most mind-numbing clichés that even someone who had been face down in ketamine for the entire weekend could improve upon. I have never heard anyone say “reveller” in real life, unless slurring the name of the confectionery brand. Breaking: rain does in fact dampen spirits.

“It’ll be great to watch Glasto on the TV all the same,” I think to myself, lying, and removing Ballinlough, Somerset, Stradbally and Marlay Park from my weather app.

So, enjoy making collective-experience memories on your life-changing weekends. I’m not bitter at all.

Twitter: @UnaMullally