5am – Another bloody festival
It’s early. No scrap that it’s f***ing early. We are off to Dorset for Camp Bestival. No that’s not a sequins and glitter musical tribute to the footballing legend. Worse, it’s the horror of a Child Friendly Festival. Surely an oxymoron if ever there was one!
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The family machine swings into gear. The closer the family unit is to a system happier we all are. We don’t have a family wall diary. We have a Ven diagram!
Kids up, dressed then fed in the car. Bags packed. Tent packed. Camera Studio packed (more later). Tweet auto published. Instamum (IM) on the phone. Accessory (thats me) at the wheel. Selfie with painted on smiles as we set off for the gridlocked mind f**k called the M6! The M6 is the modern version of Hadrian’s wall as far as I can make out. The south’s desperate attempt to keep the northerners out! HS2 don’t get me started. Basically an audacious attempt at a 21st century Viking raid by southerners looking to rob and pillage the poor northern villages in the “provinces’!
6.30am: The first “Your f***ked” message from the sat Nav. “Due to a change in traffic conditions would you like to see another route”.
I suggest to IM if she could take a look but no she’s busy doing an Instagram horror story (IHS) of the Peruvian organic granola received on the Amazon Loading dock we have fitted to the house. You know the thing we used to call the front door when we were kids.
Minor bickering ensues. An early morning skirmish nothing more. Kids in the back seat obliviously mummified on their tablets.
9.30am
On the road for two and a half hours and IM hasn’t looked up once. Fingers going like Slash on the guitar fret!
I can’t keep up with the whole thing yet alone the ferocity of the maniacal connectivity.
We are past the road block called Birmingham. Its always been bad. I remember my dad complaining 35 years ago. Absolutely f**k all has changed! A couple of billion spent on an expensive road that gets you from one queue to the next quicker!
10am The Services
“This piss is brought to you by Welcome Break. The family services”. You get the picture. Tweetergram post of the costa queue and back to the car.
The car has in the boot a tent, a few products (clothes you may call them) and a small film studio of camera equipment, enough charging cables to reach across the Atlantic and as many spare battery packs As you need to power a Tesslar! There is also a state of the art tent. “The camping nightmare is brought to you by Vango.”
Next stop the FFF. Three Fs! Don’t think that’s a hashtag yet! It might be after this Accessory has done three days of experimental visual arts! Although I am looking forward to the Luminous Trotsky Terrapin painting.
1pm. Marriage Guidance
I could go on about the car journey but like most couples it’s become a way of the IM and myself concentrating our mutual marital frustrations into a condensed “relationship experience”. As we launch into full combat on the virtues of the “A60f**k” or the “M whatever” the IM remembers it’s been at least 4 and a half minutes since the last selfie. The arm goes out. I’m sure it’s a conditioned reflex now. In a blink the kids look up wave their toothy smiles and then go back to the tablets of doom. A #instaflex would the most tragic way to describe it!
I actually think our relationship needs a good car journey. I can actually recommend it. Gets it all out. The grain mountain of trivialities. It’s almost cleansing! None it of course finds it’s way into the tweetergram post!
1.30 We made it
There is nothing that can argue with a festival volunteer car park warden in a tabard and a pin on fox tale! The next time we go to war send these fuckers in! Trump is more adept at listening to reason.
Shit. We’ve forgotten the parking pass. “F**k it. Let’s just drive home and get it”. We are three cars from the front. This must be what the first escapees form Colditz felt like when they came across their first enemy checkpoint. I can feel the beads of perseveration on the forehead. The tabard army do not buy in to the whole “we’ve been invited” “we are bloggers” “smile for the camera” bullshit. No parking disk. No bloody entry mate!
Thank f**k it’s a teenage lad who is board off his tits and fed up because his mate said “come and help out at a festival. You get a free ticket” but had forgotten to say it was not the type where drugs and bands he had heard of were playing. Although half an hour watching the “Origami Panda Slasher” mime actors recreate the financial crash in papier-mâché masks made me question what exactly was in the Tibetan Vegan Tofu I had had for lunch!
He waves us through! Thank god for that! We are in the Deep South. There are more rangerovers and Porsche Cayannes than you find at a Take That concert in Cheshire.
We are here. We are “on”. The family becomes the brand seamlessly. These kids don’t f**k about now. They know the drill. When to push for a bribe and when to deliver. They get good shit.
The Instagram Accessory Support Group
We are a disparate bunch. Our blogging partners communicate on a minute by minute basis live streaming their lives to each other! We however meet infrequently at festivals, various national trust monuments and theme parks.
There are three main types. Firstly, the committed instadad who has got a bit carried away and has his own fulltime blog instalife postbook thing. Not me. Those of us in category 2 and 3 keep well clear of this lot.
Category 2 is at the other end of the spectrum. This lot want nothing to do with the whole bloglife thing. They rarely turn up to anything and when they do skulk around at a safe distance. You won’t find this lot supporting a face full of glitter dressed as a dolphin and a FFF.
Now I like to think I am a committed member of the 3rd category. Supportive, actually quite proud of their tweet raging instapartners, able to carry off a sequined pair of leggings and fluorescent face paint. We can also take a decent selfie! I think most of us see it as a way to justify buying geeky camera kit, drones, gimbles etc etc. All tax deductible as well. This third group make up the members of the IASG.
While the IM’s meet, take selfies, compare their various items of Joules and Bowden clothing we are usualy engaged in crowd control, videoing and generally doing all the work to make up the facebook video evidence for the particular freebie we are engaged in at the time. Yep. Staff.
The Video
You have all seen them. My feed is swamped with them. I make them! Hands brushing through sunset drenched fields of corn, kids laughing and playing happily in the surf, mum and dad relaxing and gazing into each other eyes! The real experience of making one of the f***ing things is more line route canal surgery without an aesthetic!
Ever wonder why most of these videos have music? It’s to drown out the constant bickering and grumpiness of all those involved. Kids screaming and bitching? Look the other way and line up the plinky plonky tune.
“Just run over f***ing here”. “Jump on this, roll under sodding that. Smile would you for Christ sake. Pretend you’r having fun at least”. “For f***s sake the quicker we all do this the quicker this living nightmare is over”.
We actually have a GoPro routine in the pool. Seriously we do! Dive in, jump over, swim under, splash, play, jump dive, wave underwater, big thumbs up to the camera. Sorted. Footage in the can. Ice-cream.
Back to the family insta-set (that’s home to the rest of you) and bang out the video before the PR deadline. Some of us category 2 edge into the 2+ domain and actually do the editing. For **** sake don’t tell anyone but I actually like doing that. Brings me closer to my new love. The brand new macbook pro! Tools of the trade you know.
Tinkety tonk video done!
Enough of the Winging Already!
I exaggerate. Of course I do. We get to do some seriously good stuff, the kids get to do way more than they would normally and we have travelled, travelled, travelled.
My life is out there for all to see. But it’s a filtered, soft focus insta-version of it. Any one who knows me I don’t smile that much ever. I have had to develop some new muscles in my face!
Grumpy old me is still very much here!
Sorry got to go time Risk Astley is about to start on the main stage and I am being summoned for a selfie with pissed clown and a woman who should know better dressed as a grapefuit!
