On Saturday I was in London for the Field Day Festival. The weather was perfect, and after a slightly delayed train journey I was still in London in good time. We met up and made our way to Bethnal Green, the nearest tube for Victoria Park.
None of us had been to Victoria Park before. It's actually quite nice and seems to be divided into two by a road. One part has a nice lake with plenty of birdlife hanging around on it, and is quite nicely landscaped. Over the road is the part of the park where the festival was being held, which was a much more straightforward green space with a few trees, along with some big monument thing. The festival was close to this, enclosed in a 7 foot fence.
The queue to get in was minimal, although for some reason that was never quite clear they divided people into male and female queues. I assumed that this was something to do with searches, but nobody was being searched anyway. Weird. All that it meant was that there was a lot of people hanging around just in the site waiting for their opposite-sexed friends. The rather overly-keen security staff were also taking food and drink, including water, away from people. This seemed a bit mean on such a hot day.
The site itself was quite small - apparently the capacity was 10,000, although I don't think that it got close to that while we were there. We grabbed some food (no queues for that) and had a wander around. This was fairly on in the day and the queues for beer were quite large, so we thought we'd wait and go later. That was our main mistake! As the day went on, beer queues grew and grew. There were only two bars for all 10,000 people, and it was taking literally hours to get served! Needless to say, we didn't bother. We stick with the rather strange cider-based 'Sungria', which we manged to get without much queuing early on. That was about the only alcohol we got all day though, thanks to the mad queues (which were nothing, compared to the toilets!). The lack of thought that had gone into bars and toilets was fairly amazing, and there were many disgruntled people. The music was pretty cool though, if hampered by a weedy sound system, so the day was still good overall. I just hope that next time the organisers try to decide how many toilets 10,000 people need when drinking they come-up with a number greater than 30.
After the festival we went to the pub for a few drinks, then onto a new sushi place in (I think) Kensington High Street, that was pretty good. After another few pints in the pub we called it a day.
On Sunday we went to see The Walker, which was actually very good. Woody Harrelson is a great actor - has he ever been in a bad film? Anyway, he was very good in this as a gay 'society walker' in Washington. I must admit that it's a career I have never really thought about, but it makes for an interesting film, and it's interesting how his 'society ladies' react to the events. Worth a go anyway. Now I just need to catch The Simpsons!
V Festival this weekend - I hope it stops raining! I've had enough of muddy festivals this year!