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7 Days, Day 3: Festivals

For the next seven days I am going to blog about any topic that my readers see fit to get me to write about, having asked on here and on Twitter. Here, for your reading delectation, is Day Two, subject submitted by @gregeden on twitter.

I consider myself to be quite the connoisseur of festivals, having been to about 20 of them over the years, and like anyone who has been to festivals have quite a few good stories. My favourite festival story is not mine though, and so I bring you the story of my good friend Rob at Reading 99.

Rob has always had a bit of a reputation for needlessly getting himself into trouble.  This is a man who did a bungee jump one week after a hernia operation. The same man who scaled a lighting pole at one Leeds Festival only to lose his grip and plummet into a bin. Who once had his own Father put a hit out on him.  Rob is the guy you take with you to a festival who gets so wasted on the first night that he doesn't go and see any bands until the last day.

At the Reading festival in 1999 he outdid himself.  It started off with Rob on the first night asking around if anyone had any acid, which none of us did. He's never been a prolific drug taker, none of us were, so it took us a bit by surprise.  He didn't manage to score any that night, nor the night after, although he remained adamant that he wanted to take some acid.  He got drunk out of his skull as per usual and by the last day of the festival none of us had heard from him for a while.

It turned out that on the last day he had decided that in order to procure said hallucinogens he needed to look further afield than our little field.  Off he trundled, asking everyone he could find if they had any. It's a wonder he didn't get arrested.

Apparently, what happened next was that he bumped into someone who recommended he go and check out the Herbal High tent.  He wasn't sure if that would do the full job he had in mind, so he carried on his fruitless search for a little while longer.  Eventually he gave up, and was about to head back to our tents when he came upon the aforementioned Herbal High tent.  He enquired as to their effectiveness and was assured that they were every bit as strong as the real thing, and that since it was his first time he should under no circumstances take more than two tabs.

Instead of taking this advice, however, Rob decided to digest the whole sheet systematically, not realising that the 'kick' would not come for a while.  It was around the time he finished that it finally arrived, and he spewed forth a torrent of festival food and beer and paper.  Disorientated and tripping, he made his way back to the tent while we were all still in the arena and collapsed into the relative safety of his plastic abode.

An undetermined time later, the tent door was unzipped and Rob looked in horror as a bald man and a woman climbed in and commenced fervent lovemaking next to him. They went one for quite some time until the bald man looked over and saw Rob.

'Oh sorry mate, I didn't see you there,' he said nonchalantly, before adding 'are you all right mate, you don't look very well.'

'Well actually, I just took a whole sheet of acid.'

'Really? Are you seeing anything weird?'

'Well there's two strangers fucking, right in front of me.'

Undeterred, the man and woman continued to go at it, completely ignoring Rob. The next he knew, another woman climbed into the tent and made her way alongside Rob, so paralytic she could barely speak.  She fumbled around with Rob for a bit, but he was so freaked out that he says at this point he simply blacked out, presumably his mind shutting down for the sake of self preservation.

Now all of this comes from the account of a man tripping heavily, so I can't be sure what is real and what isn't. But the one thing I do know is that the next morning, concerned for where Rob had disappeared to, we opened the tent to see Rob laying in the tent looking utterly bewildered, two naked women laying alongside him asleep, with no bald man in sight.

And who says drugs can't do good things?