Festival review by : "Satisfied customer"

Glastonbury Festival 1999

Friday 25th to Sunday 27th June 1999
Worthy Farm, Pilton, nr Glastonbury, Somerset, England
£83

(bit of a strange one this! - ed!)

Glastonbury on 4 diapers.

Well, you and your mates finally arrived at Glastonbury Music Festival after hours of travel. You visit one of the wonderful ethnic foodstalls, maybe have a beer and wander off to the main stage to see some live bands. There you are in front of the main stage, a great band has come on and you are having the time of your life until suddenly you realise you need to pee really bad. You stand there trying to hold your sphincter muscle tightly shut, hoping in vain that you can hold on for another 35 minutes but you realise that this is not going to work. You have got to pee very soon. Fearing the scenario where you wet yourself, you announce to your friends that you have to go pee and off you rush towards the toilet area provided. Almost doubled up with agony you get to the toilets after ten minutes of pushing through the mindless throng. Then you have to queue for another ten minutes to gain access to the thing, all the time crippled by the need to pee. You approach the door and the sense of about to be fulfilled relief rushes forth into your loins. In true Pavlovian style, your sphincter begins to relax. You grasp the door finally get inside one of the cubicles only to discover that it has not flushed for a couple of hours and is nearly filled to the brim with a lively pungent cocktail of pee and poo. You recoil with loathing of the vile suffocating stench that reaches your nose but realise that now you are just about to wet your trousers, so it's do or die. Holding your breath you close the door of the dimly lit cubicle and wading in a sea of urine, unzip your flies then breathe a virtual sigh of relief as you let go your bladder. Out comes the tiniest little dribble of pee and you stop. That's it, 10ml of pee caused this. Fuck, fuck, fuck! Grumpily you shake off the drips and exit this bog of eternal stench. Back out of this excrement gas chamber once more you can gulp deep breaths of fresh air once more and the feeling of nausea wears off. Now you have to work your way back to your friends who are still watching the band playing. Ten more frenzied minutes of pushing and shoving later you arrive back at the main stage only to discover that :

a) you can't find your group of friends or
b) the band you were watching have finished their act or (more often than not,)
c) both

Does the story I have just related ring any bells within you? Well it did with me, until this year.

I have endured this sort of misery at festivals and other outdoor events in the past and decided that this year I was not going to have my festival time spoilt by the vagaries of my bladder retention scheme, and also I would enjoy the added bonus of not having to ever enter one of the on-site toilets. So this year, along with the usual paraphernalia required for a weekend at a festival, I took a four pack of adult disposable diapers/ nappies and decided to try them out in an experimental capacity.

Diapers or nappies come in two major categories, cloth (Terries) and disposables. Cloth is a bit tedious if you don't have access to the usual home comforts of running water, washing machine and drier. Disposables are ideal and can be thrown away after use. They were developed originally by NASA to allow astronauts to relieve themselves without removing their space suits. Well, I mused, if adult astronauts can wear nappies/ diapers then so can I.

Never have to rush away from the main stage again and lose your friends just because you suddenly need to pee and the toilets are 500 metres away.

I put my first one on late on Friday night before I went to sleep and had a small leak just before I went to sleep to get rid of the pressure in my bladder. I woke up early needing a pee so let the lot go. I got out of my sleeping bag and removed the wet disposable, bagged it up then wiped my wet bits clean with a Johnson's baby wipe. I put real underwear on for the rest of the day until around 9pm when I had decided what I wanted to indulge myself in. Saturday night was terrific. I had to go twice during the course of the night, once while watching the Manic Street Preachers and once during Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas which was showing on one of the huge cinema screens. When the night was done and the first rays of daylight were beginning to show themselves over the eastern horizon, I decided to go back to our camp. Once inside my tent I made sure that my bladder was empty in the by now squishy wet disposable and changed into a fresh one for the night. I didn't need to wet this one till the next morning after which I wiped and changed into my last one. This was for the journey home, a 7 hour road ordeal during which time it can be convenient to have a toilet handy. Inside a disposable is ideal. In fact I was able to use a proper toilet during the day so my nappy stayed dry till halfway through writing this in its first draft.

It is unbelievable the freedom that it gives you not having to worry about where you pee next. Of course you do still have the option of peeing somewhere outside of your diaper unless of course you are hard core AB. For a modest 50p (80c) you can get away with half a day of not bothering to find one of the toilets from hell within the site.

The other nice benefit of the modest investment of 50p is wearing a diaper overnight and then waking up in the morning to find that you don't need to go for that 10 minute stroll to find a stench cubicle. And this is because you already wet in the night or alternatively you peed first thing when you woke. Next thing you should do is get that wet diaper off and clean yourself. then change into something dry. I used Johnson baby wipes to clean up with and there was neither a hint of nappy rash or soreness or odours despite being wet for a few hours at a time. It is a good idea to spend a couple of hours in the early part of each day without a diaper, returning to your tent later to get a diaper/ nappy on. I used perfumed nappy sacks to keep the wet diapers/ nappies in then put the bags in a large black refuse sack. Nobody was able to hear what I was doing as I was changing and cleaning myself in my tent because all the noise made by nylon tents and sleeping bags and plastic groundsheets easily drowns any noises made by the diapers either when changing or when sitting down.

I found myself grinning whenever any of my friends announced that they had to go pee, at the same time vociferously complaining about the state of the toilets and I wonder if any of them noticed that I didn't visit a cubicle once in the whole time I was at the festival.

Well, if you are still reading this you might say that because I'm male its easy to pee anywhere so I could have avoided the cubicles anyway. True, but not if I were a girl. Men, by virtue of their anatomy require less privacy than women when they pee. I would imagine that girls for whom the smell of the toilets is totally disgusting would like the freedom offered by diapers/ nappies as their toilet routine does not have the hose pipe ease as that of a man does.

I didn't say anything about pooing, because if you poo in a disposable of the usual design as it tends to splat all over your bum and is awkward to clean without running water. For pooing, I take a spade and toilet roll for a long walk until I find a secluded area, I dig a hole and shit in the hole then cover it up. That is the freshest and most eco-conscious way I ever found to poo.

I enjoyed my time at Glastonbury more than I ever have in the past. I did not miss one minute of any of the acts that I wanted to see. For around £5 for disposables and baby wipes I think that I made a wise choice of festival survival equipment. I shall always take fresh supplies of disposables to any outdoor gathering in future. Despite being marketed totally at babies and very young children, nappies/ diapers have a vital role to play in adult life too. I think that I enjoyed my time all the more by partially returning to the security a baby has when he wants to pee by not having to find a designated area and secondly by not having to visit the nasty smelly toilets provided at large outdoor gatherings such as festivals.