Bogs for the girls

[j4]

This year there will be special loos just for the laydeez at Glastonbury. (Thanks to sion_a for spotting this one.)

How daft, though. I don't want toilets which aren't used by men -- they're all individual cubicles anyway! -- I want toilets that aren't used by morons. I certainly don't think men have a monopoly on being filthy and inconsiderate.

Comments

[fluffymormegil.livejournal.com]

Women have to go out of their way to piss on the seat.

[senji.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, selecting for morons is harder...

[j4.livejournal.com]

Well, the toilets at Glasto often end up so grim that you don't want to sit on them at all, so you end up trying to piss squatting over the toilet rather than sitting on it, at which point it is quite easy to hit the seat (especially given how, er, undirected it tends to be).

But if I do hit the seat I wipe it up with some of the huge wads of loo-paper that I have stuffed in my cargo-pockets.

Glasto 'top tip': DO NOT go in the chemical portaloos while tripping. *shudder*

[j4.livejournal.com]

Selecting for "women" isn't always that easy...

[senji.livejournal.com]

Letting people self-select that is probably good enough 99% of the time.

Probably.

Putting a sign up on a loo "No Morons", while being funny, probably wouldn't work :).

[karen2205]

How about putting a loo where the Morons wouldn't think to look for one.

[senji.livejournal.com]

Only tell the clued about it? :)

[juliet]

Gosh. I don't think I've ever used a loo at Glasto *that* bad - though I do frequently use some of the huge wads of loo-paper to wipe the seat off beforehand. Mind you, I avoid the portaloos if at *all* possible (will walk quite a way if necessary) and stick to the long-drop & similar, which are invariably nicer. And I've certainly seen toilets sufficiently grim that I just avoided them altogether & found another one.

But by and large IME the loos at Glasto are nowhere near as bad as is commonly made out. Certainly they're better than the Reading campsite ones (mostly because they get cleaned out regularly), and the long-drop aren't too horrendous at all. Maybe I just have a high tolerance for such things, mind...

[juliet]

Well, the WaterAid ones up near the Stone Circle are said to be very good, but always have a large queue, so I've never checked personally.

[karen2205]

As a non-festival goer, to ask a silly question - why are there so many problems with the toilets/washing facilities at Glastonbury?

Surely, all you need to do is provide enough toilets/showers (one per eight people - if not more) suitated close to wear people are camping eg. so no one has to walk half a mile to get to the nearest one, and clean them daily (if not more often). It's hardly rocket science (well, ensuring that the sewage facilities can cope might be....)

If you provide free, clean drinking water at suitable points round the site (not right beside the toilets), as you really ought to, then that might help to reduce the number of Morons (I'm guessing Moronic behaviour is generally caused by drunkenness - access to water would help alleviate that).

[gnimmel.livejournal.com]

Maybe there should be a Moron-diversion loo; say, with a big and not-entirely-truthful sign on it announcing 'free beer!' or somesuch. Then everyone else can use the other loos.

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

one per eight people

Because that'd mean something like 15,000 toilets/showers...

[lusercop.livejournal.com]

Not forgetting all the people who work there....

[j4.livejournal.com]

It's when there's a lot of... well, fallout. Mind you, there were times when I had trouble finding a portaloo which was still concave. Blehhh.

The long-drop ones are much nicer, though. And by and large you can find one that's okay, though you often have to wander a bit to find them.

I think I avoided the Reading campsite ones completely when I went to Reading, and just made sure to use the ones in the arena (which were okayish) before going to bed! (Given that everybody seemed to be using loo-paper to decorate trees before setting fire to them, I wasn't too hopeful that they'd treat the toilets any less moronically.)

[j4.livejournal.com]

The problem, as hoiho points out, is the scale of the thing. The portaloos get cleaned at least once a day, but 150,000+ people produce a lot of sewage!

As for the drinking water -- there is free, clean water available at strategic points, but do you really think the sort of people who drink huge crates of lager and then behave like idiots [fortunately, there are far fewer of these at Glastonbury -- by percentage at least -- than at many other festivals] are going to stop and think "I know, I'll just have a glass of water instead"?

[j4.livejournal.com]

Then once they go past the sign they fall into a concealed PIT full of HUNGRY CROCODILES. Yes. I like this idea. :->

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

Don't they get nice toilets in the back-stage area?

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

I'll be wearing a dress[0] - can I use the pink bogs?

Well, a dress-like thing.

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

The portaloos get cleaned at least once a day

They're supposed to be changing that this year, to minimise the amount of motor traffic on the site. How they will manage it is a different matter...

[j4.livejournal.com]

Doubt if the vendors etc. get backstage toilets, though the performers probably do.

[j4.livejournal.com]

It's tricky, you see, because if you self-identify as a woman then QUACK! QUACK! but if you are biologically female then MOOOOOO! and of course not all biological females self-identify as women, and we should respect the OUH-OUH-OUH-OUH but of course some people will simply object to the attempt to dichotomise BAAAA BAAAAA BAAAAA.

[fluffymormegil.livejournal.com]

s/beer/lager/ and the worries about truthfulness go away.

[juliet]

As others have said: the basic problem is the scale of the operation. 150,000 people onsite - Glastonbury becomes the biggest town in the county (or something like that - possibly the biggest in the southwest) for 4 days every June. It's basically a farm, and whilst there are extensive sewage provisions onsite, it's still bloody difficult. A shower per 8 people is a non-starter - there's no way they could provide the water (there are some showers, but most folk don't bother for the 4 days they're there - you can always wash in cold water under one of the taps if need be). They do get cleaned at least daily (or have done in previous years), but 150,000 people is a *lot* of waste.

Free, clean drinking water is of course provided - but people *want* to drink, it's not that they *have* to.

If you're interested in the logistics, there's assorted student packs available from the website which have documents about the logistics of the festival (in particular most of the Working Group report after the 2001 festival - or was it 2000? - was heavily gatecrashed and they had to review the whole operation to keep their license).

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

(is the new black)

[burkesworks.livejournal.com]

> Well, a dress-like thing.

Oh, you mean a black binliner! Very goff.

[nja.livejournal.com]

This is why I've never even considered going to Glastonbury:

a) It isn't actually in Glastonbury, so it is founded on deception, and
b) People seem to spend ages talking about the foul state of the bogs, far more so than the music. If I ever want to listen to Jamiroquai while sitting in a pool of other people's shit, I'll know something has gone seriously wrong with my brain.

[j4.livejournal.com]

Oh, I could talk about the music at quite unbelievably boring length if you wanted. People/bands I saw last year included:

Richard Thompson
Radiohead
REM
Waterboys
Suede
Beth Orton
Inspiral Carpets
John Otway
Crazy World of Arthur Brown
Attila the Stockbroker
Leningrad Cowboys

As well as lots of other bands who I was interested to listen to at the time, listened to a bit of, but who obviously weren't memorable enough for me to remember them. Oh, we listened to a bit of Yes, but they were crap. One of the good things about the music is that you can wander in and out of gigs, so there's much more chance to hear new music without having to pay for it before you know if you like it. People I'd like to catch a couple of minutes of this year, just to see if they're worth following up:

Groove Armada
Nelly Furtado
Franz Ferdinand
Goldfrapp
Von Bondies
Raveonettes

All bands I've heard other people mention but I wouldn't pay a tenner (the likely price of a cheap gig round here) to go and see them when I might want to walk out after the first five minutes.
There's already so much I want to see this year, just glancing down the listings, that if I saw them all individually I'd pay the Glasto ticket price several times over.

Then there's all the circus stuff... we stumbled into an utterly amazing circus/drama show -- fireworks, trapeze, stilts, semi-naked people with wings in cages, existential and authorial angst, that sort of thing -- quite by accident while walking back from somewhere else and were absolutely spellbound by it until it finished. This year I'm going to make more of an attempt to find out what's going on in the circus fields.

Then there's all the other stuff. Just... stuff. People, and things, and happenings, and just the glorious colourful tapestry of experience, the wonder of it all.

I only brought up the subject of the bogs because I saw that article and thought it was a bit of a daft idea.

[burkesworks.livejournal.com]

> a) It isn't actually in Glastonbury

That's as maybe, but nobody outside that part of Somerset has heard of Pilton, and "Shepton Mallet Festival" tends to conjure up visions of Adge Cutler and the Wurzels. Or Stackridge. Or Jack Hargreaves talking about fertiliser.

> If I ever want to listen to Jamiroquai while sitting in a
> pool of other people's shit, I'll know something has gone
> seriously wrong with my brain

Isn't the "while sitting in a pool of other people's shit" a bit superfluous here?
As for Glasto itself, haven't bothered since 1990. Far too big and commercial now, despite the admittedly stellar line-up. And not the same with cops and ShowSec goons on site. Baaaaad trip, man!

[nja.livejournal.com]

I'm just a miserable old bugger. Last gig I went to was Spiritualized (on the Pure Phase tour), mainly to hear Seefeel who didn't turn up, and that would have been almost ten years ago. I did go to Womad in the mid-eighties, mainly because it was held a mile from my parents' house so I could sleep in a proper bed.

[lusercop.livejournal.com]

Not to get into the BAA! MOO! discussion of why to go to glastonbury, but after going for the first time last year, and getting a ticket with about 2 days to go, I found it to be a total release from my normal day-to-day life, with little of the pressures that I find myself normally facing. It re-taught me what the good things in life were. (yeah, yeah, devilsticking and poi, I know!).