Glastonbury on wheels

Anyone stressing over whether they can manage with a child at a festival should read this brilliant article by Anton Cataldo…

Glastonbury 2007. Monday morning. I awake to find a river running under my tent, and that pretty much summed up my whole festival. Two hundred quid and all I got was trench foot. Fast-forward to 2010 and I’m possibly facing the same again…but this time with two kids to boot, one of them in a wheelchair. At least I was getting the ticket for free this time.

A quick summary first. I have worked as a part-time “manny”/carer to Joss and Kitty for nearly five years. Joss is nine, possibly the coolest kid you are ever likey to meet with a near encyclopedic musical knowledge. He is also a wheelchair-user due to his cerebral palsy. Kitty is six, feisty, adorable and doesn’t even know the meaning of the word fear. Dad is a DJ, record producer, and runs a label. Mum is a pilates instructor. To say this family enjoys an adventure would be putting it mildly. Morocco will always come before Marbella on a destination shortlist. Plane? Hell no! we’ll take the train….to Barcelona. You get the picture. And now we were all going to conquer Glastonbury together…. hopefully.

So. 6am. Thursday. Hurtling down the M4 on the way to Glastonbury. Excitement nullified by abject fatigue. The sun is blazing down, but I’m still not convinced. Me and festivals have a bad track record. I’m still expecting The Somme. As we approached the site it seemed like the festival had already started, with thousands of tents spread across the horizon. Although bizarrely it all seemed pretty quiet when we pulled into red gate, with dozens of people standing around directing us every twenty yards, or so. We picked up our passes, and headed for the disabled campsite. 

Now, if you have ever been to Glastonbury I think its fair to say that the actual camping part of the experience wouldn’t be listed as a highlight. Trudging around desperately trying to find a few inches of space, eventually ending up sandwiched between the toilets and a party of ten Hoxtonians snorting ketamine til 6am every night. The disabled campsite is like REAL camping. With space and neighbours and grass and a campfire and everything. One of the disabled campsite team will gently direct you to your plot and even help you put up your tent if needs be. There are wide passages to maneuver around the site. Toilets are plentiful, wheelchair accessible, and cleaned regularly. And there are showers. Yes, showers.

Furthermore, Outsiders (www.outsiders.org.uk), an organisation for people with disabilities who feel socially excluded, provided very helpful volunteers and a wonderful tent which acted as a social hub, with free tea, coffee and squash as well as massage and body work, mobile phone re-charging, wheelchair battery recharging, face painting, music, and entertainment.

There was a real sense of community within the camp. Our neighbors in particular, a family from the Wirral, were excellent company. Sometimes you’d have no real urge to leave the campsite. It was also excellent to meet people with such a huge range of disabilities, from a massive spectrum of ages, and see how they lived their lives, on both a practical and an emotional level and I think the experience was invaluable for Joss.

My only quibble with the disabled campsite was the position of it, right up near the pyramid stage. Obviously this is great if you want to check out the big main bands, but if you fancied a mooch round the kids area, or to check out a bit of comedy or just to escape the madness and chill in the healing fields for a bit, then these trips were a bit of a trek. Saying this, there was a minibus service that would take you to various other sites around the festival, but I never seemed to be able to get the hang of the departure times.

So what about the festival itself? Well, it just seems to get bigger every year, and the amazing weather made it seem like there were even more people as everyone milled about enjoying the sunshine. The lack of mud made the tracks pretty easy to navigate with a wheelchair, although there are some fairly steep paths. Also, don’t expect the smoothest ride…it is a dairy farm after all. Most people from the disabled camp seemed to have either hired a rough terrain chair, or seriously pimped up their existing chairs with fat wheels or motorized add-ons. The buggy we hired for the four days was called a Hippocambe, (www.hippocambe.com) and was extremely maneuverable and excellent for getting around the festival, although its length did make it a little cumbersome sometimes, not helped when Kitty was hitching a ride in it as well…which was most of the time!

The main obstacle with moving around the festival was probably just the vast number of people who were trying to do the same. There were a few moments when I felt genuine panic pushing the chair through an ever-swelling throng of people who didn’t seem to be moving anywhere, not helped by the fact that most people had also probably consumed a fair few shandys. But there always seemed to be someone in the crowd a little more aware who’d do their best to help you clear a path. Failing that a short jap of a wheelchair into someone’s calves always seemed to get them moving.

Shortcuts could be taken around the site through paths that were closed to general festival-goers, which made getting around a little easier. If only it hadn’t taken me three days to actually work out where they went, then I’m sure they would have been more useful.

I should also mention that there were disabled toilets strategically around the festival, which were all locked by a combination padlock to which we had all in the diabled campsite been privy to the code. Locating them was sometimes a bit of a headache, and then when you eventually find one it was ever so slightly annoying to find that some unhelpful festival goer had changed the combination. Grrr.

Most of the larger stages had viewing platforms allowing disabled people and their assistants to get a decent view, but at times these would get pretty packed and you’d need to arrive early to be sure of getting a spot. Out of all of them the best view was to be had at the John Peel stage- not too far away from the action and positioned right in front of the stage. Although the stewards were having none of it when I tried to stick Joss on my shoulders so that we could have a boogie to Jamie T. Spoilsports.

All in all it was a great experience, aided largely by the beautiful weather. If there had been knee high mud I’m sure the whole thing would have seemed much more daunting, nigh on impossible. As it happens this wasn’t the case. It was a real pleasure seeing the madness that is Glastonbury through the eyes of a kid, and doing stuff I never would have usually done. In 2007 I don’t remember once visiting the circus tent, but that’s probably where I had the best time in 2010. I look forward to one day maybe taking my own kids….until then theres always 2011!