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If South Africa has football fever, well, London festival fever is in full swing. They range from Spanish food festivals to literary festivals to folk and electronica. The number alone already blows my mind, never mind the quality and extravagance of the actual events. There is literally something for everyone. Be you barefoot-free-love hippy or dance music lover with a techo-ticker beating in your chest, the land of smoke and fog has something grand for you.
Although it’s no new nuance regarding London, it still fascinates me that if you wish to join a nudist chess club on a Wednesday evening, chances are there’s one around the corner. Anyway, these festivals took my breath away as soon as I began writing and reading about them. The ingenuity and effort crammed into these two to five day events left me gawking and oohing to the degree where you’d think I’d never been to a one before. I have been to music festivals in South Africa and I loved every windy, dusty, ska-rocking, electro-stomping inch of sunshine they provided me with - but the scale that you find here is incomparable. It’s understandable, I mean, just trying to fly an international performer down to the southernmost tip of Africa is rather expensive. USA to UK? No problem. Flight costs are just one factor in putting together the ticket price, so imagine attempting to host an array international headliners? Prices would sky rocket. It may be partly based on South Africa’s inexperience in this particular kind of event. It has everything necessary to host creative and fantastical events, but there hasn’t been an organiser who has seriously stepped out and put one on just yet, and I wonder if we have enough crazies to support. I know I’d be there, hook line and bloody sinker. For those who don’t know, the extremities festival goers indulge in is absolutely delicious. If a festival is themed, attendees go completely off their rocker and comply wholeheartedly. Half measures are non-existent. With things like Afrika Burns and the like cropping up, I think South Africa can expect big things in terms of decadent events and I can’t wait to be a part of it!
Back on this large island, I long to go to the festivals it has to offer, but with pockets empty, all I can do is look at line-ups and other quirky additions on my computer screen as saliva drips from my open trap onto an annoyed keyboard. But (and there is a most joyous ‘but’), although I fit a paupers profile at this point in my life, I am hit with a stroke of jolly good luck. I happen to work for an online media company who are sending me off to an excessively exciting festival called Standon Calling. I wrote the linked news piece and became totally smitten with the idea of going.
Today I wrote a differently themed piece, not hyping up any particular festival, but rather consoling those who are not attending Glastonbury. Supply ideas, which colleagues collated with me, it’s providing an Alternative Glastonbury weekend in London. A weekend is never dull when your abode finds itself in London; possibilities aren’t merely numerous, they are infinite.
