Suzanne Harrington: I've just signed an NDA for my next job — at Glastonbury
People watch the Arcadia show at the Glastonbury Festival site at Worthy Farm in Pilton on June 25, 2017 near Glastonbury, England.
I’m off to Glastonbury. Not as a punter, or a journalist — but as a volunteer.
Instead of a frenzy of clicking last November when the 142,000 tickets went on sale — they sell out literally in minutes, giving you about the same odds of bagging one as finding a Willy Wonka Golden Ticket in your KitKat — I’ll be one of the 63,000 people working there, from Elton John to the poo-truck operators.
I’ve just signed an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) so have to remain mysterious, but let’s just say my role will be nearer the Elton end of things than the poo-truck. If anyone doesn’t like blue M&Ms, it will be my job to get rid of them. The blue M&Ms, I mean. Not the people who don’t like them, who I can’t talk about, ever, because of the NDA.
What I can talk about is this: I am worried I won’t hack it. I’m quite old.
What if I need a nap?
It’s one thing to go to a festival, and it’s another thing to go to work — what happens when you try to do the two things together? Where do you fit in the naps? How am I going to do a day’s work sorting the M&Ms, then see all the bands, all the acts, all the performers, on a site with 100 stages stretching over the equivalent of 500 football pitches — it becomes the fourth largest city in the region when it pops up each year — where you have to walk everywhere?
Getting from Lizzo to Young Fathers to Sparks to the techno tent will be like being an Amazon warehouse worker marching endless distances, except across fields, in the dark, surrounded by tens of thousands of people off their heads.
I won’t be. Off my head, I mean. Gone are the days of dancing until 7am, then going straight to work with expanded eyeballs, dazed and confused, fortified by nothing more than Diet Coke, a bruised banana, and callow youth. These days, I’d have a panic attack at the very thought. The only drugs I’ll be on are paracetamol and ibuprofen.
But it’s not being at a festival — not even one as gigantic as Glastonbury — which worries me. I love festivals. It’s not the camping either — I love camping. Give me a tent over a hotel any day. I love the smell of nature in the morning. Bring it on.
No, it’s the work. Having to work set consecutive days, at set times, doing set tasks, while somehow remaining competent, pleasant, and positively engaged; I haven’t attempted this since 1998, when I was fired from my last job for achieving none of these things. Now I have signed up to be part of a team, after 25 years of working in glorious solitude.
How do you speak to people at work, when your only work companion is the dog asleep on the floor?
What do you say to people? Is there a Duolingo for that?
Or can I plead selective mutism?
