Anthropologically speaking, you can do little better than roam the campsite of a British music festival at five in the morning, for a fascinating insight into human weirdness. The gallery of rogues encountered across these mud-drowned, can-strewn plains at this time of the day doesn’t quite run the entire gamut, but I’d say it comes damn well close enough. All that separates me from these poor wandering souls is a fluorescent jacket, rubber gloves and the fact that, where my hangover is slowly (but surely) dawning, theirs is a few hours off from crashing down upon them. I am here to work; they, to play.
Although I have been able to catch some of the acts this year and the last here at Reading, where these sad, sleepless figures that I pass have shelled out hundreds of pounds or so to see and hear the Arctic Monkeys, The Kooks, Vampire Weekend and co. strum out a few tunes, I have had to earn my keep by working.
I’ve searched long and hard for a euphemism that would make my job more palatable on a CV – Custodian of Site Cleanliness? Superintendent for Waste Disposal? – with little success. I’m here to pick up shit. Not literal shit, fortunately (although you do get paid extra for that). I am in fact one of the festival’s small army of litter pickers, and have been for two years running.
Three days at a festival, even if spent picking up other people’s rubbish during thirteen hour shifts beginning at five in the morning, isn’t such a bad way to tide things over financially in the summer vacation. The money’s okay and, after all, I have learnt many a thing along the way. If it is true that you can learn a lot about a person from their trash, then the thousands of trash-cans changed at Reading offer an extremely informative educational experience.
Of Glaswegians, who seemed to constitute half the litter-picking force last year, I learnt of a staggering tolerance for alcohol. It was, for example, on Reading’s opening day in 2013 that I respectfully declined a can of confiscated Strongbow from one such heavily-accented colleague. Though not normally one to refuse such a generous offering, it was only eleven in the morning. ‘Maybe later’, I reply. ‘Naw’t much’a drinker?’ he asks. No, I guess not.
Of the Czech, who both then and now seem to constitute the other half of the litter-picking force (the Glaswegians having been replaced this year by a gaggle of earnest young Polish teens), I learnt that they really don’t like the Glaswegians very much. The Glaswegians, I came to realise, dislike the Czech even more.
English male teens, I’ve found out, have an abiding love for Ivorian footballers; and by the same token, I’ve learnt that there are only oh-so-many times you can take hearing the names Kolo and Yaya Toure being chanted by lads who just can’t handle their fifth can of Foster’s, before violence will break out.
I also found out how easily the campsite I walk across to clean at five in the morning lends itself to Attenborough-style narration, which was a pretty decent way of whiling away the hours. ‘Watch,’ I hear David intone, ‘as the pack slink back to their canvas dwellings. These are the night’s final stragglers. Having failed to attract a mate for the night, in their despair, they now search for deep-fried food before hibernation. This is the tragedy as old as time’.
Mankind has no greater source of soul-crushing existential crisis than the silent disco, as I have observed. And picking up bags upon bags of trash at five in the morning, two hours after returning from a silent disco and with little to no sleep, is perhaps even more taxing than writing an essay hungover, especially under the late-August sun.
Showing off your special staff wristband, I discovered, is a good way to impress girls. Although, this fails when you must admit that okay, no, you’re not actually part of Alex Turner’s entourage, and well, no, you don’t have his number, even though you did clean his area backstage earlier that day. ‘I do have access to special staff showers, though?’, I have learnt, is in fact a surprisingly enticing brag.
I soon learnt that a fluorescent jacket, a walkie-talkie and a confident swagger offer a passport to anywhere you could possibly want to go. But two hours of sleep leaves you ill-prepared for thirteen hour shifts of hard manual labour, as I learnt the hard way. And if you really wanted to, you could fit twenty-seven people in a vehicle with a supposed maximum capacity of eighteen.
Strongbow Dark Fruits, I found out, makes bins smell really fucking bad. And if I didn’t know it already, bin juice is one of the foulest liquids known to the human species. Despite this, many people are perfectly willing to drink it. But doing so is a likely one-way ticket to Hepatitis C (it could totally get you wasted, though).
But the most important lesson that I’ve taken away, is that I never want to clean a fucking bin again in my life.
