Fancy a comfier V Festival experience?
The line-up for V Festival 2015 has been officially announced, and boy is it an exciting one! With headline acts the likes of Calvin Harris and Stereophonics, the festival can expect a veritable horde of paying customers to descend on it that fine late-August weekend. But festivals are unavoidably messy business. So how to make them that bit… comfier? Here’s a handy set of tips for making your V Fest experience that little bit less ‘ew’.
Sleeping Quarters
Working this out before you leave for Hylands Park is key. The classic festival experience is a grubby-tented one, with varying degrees of order to your belongings dependent on whether or not you sprang for an Early Bird ticket. Tents can be sweaty, unforgiving and, if you, like thousands of festival-goers each and every year, forget some form of mattress substitute, extremely uncomfortable. Fevered dreams of a decent divan, a fab four-poster or stacks upon stacks of memory-foam mattresses abound as you, the beleaguered fan of all things noise, succumb to another eve of scratchy groundsheet and back pain. If this sounds like you this festival, and you will be thinking, ever-thinking of those Bedstar-quality bedding items, it’s definitely worth checking the nearest hotels, B&Bs or hostels out of love for your poor poor back. If you are insistent on the tent and all the discomfort it may provide, however, be sure to bring enough warm clothing to stave off the always-underestimated chills of 3am, and if you’re too warm, you can use some excess clothes as neck support.
Sanitation
Dirt is part of the festival experience, no doubt about it – but that’s no excuse to fester for 5 days, and you’ll feel far more up for letting armpits out of sweaty tops with an arsenal of nifty cleaning products stowed away. Along with toothbrush and paste, bring a travel-container of shampoo and a pack of wet wipes. Take the shampoo when brushing your teeth at the communal sinks, and quickly wash your hair – it will dry over the day and you won’t feel grotty. Meanwhile, the in-tent wet-wipe shower will become the healthiest part of your morning routine (between the first can of Tennants and the first bite of cold, crunchy super noodles).
Food
Speaking of super noodles, it’s vitally important to bring the right foodstuffs along, lest you inadvertently give yourself scurvy. A punnet of oranges will give you all the vitamin C you could possibly need, and stave off the inevitable ‘Festival Flu’ you’ll likely experience in its final days. Bread, if kept in a dry corner of the tent, will keep long enough and provide cheap, filling sustenance, especially when paired with a tub of houmous. Instant noodles are a smart move on the price and flavour front, but cooking them properly can be a problem without sufficient cooking materials. It is perfectly fine to eat ramen raw, and might even be worth making a ramen snack mix with broken-up noodles, flavouring, and various nuts – cheap, easy tea with nutritional value.
Founding editor of Counteract. Freelance travel and music journalist.