Festivalians
This column is dedicated to the person who turned up to a book signing event at a recent festival and asked me to sign, yes, sure, my book, but also a copy of one of my columns in The Big Issue. This person’s name might have been Bec or she may merely have been Bec-adjacent. But let us call her Bec. Now, Bec is a person, but also a metaphor. I know. I’m sorry Bec. But to me, she seemed like a metaphor for that very human instinct of connecting with like-minded people.
Public Service Announcement: be a festival of you. Turn up and do your favourite things with other people who value those things. If you can’t find any: keep looking. Festivals are for browsing and reading and watching and learning and reflecting. Why don’t we do more of that stuff? I just searched the words ‘festival of’ and found the following results: festival of flowers, festival of colours, festival of veterans arts, of Slovak films, of gin, of bridge (the game, not the structure), and my personal favourite: the festival of small halls. There’s a festival of underwater music and of cheese-rolling. There’s something called The Wife Carrying Festival and something else called The Night of the Radishes.
If there isn’t a festival for the thing you like: make one. I went past a festival recently that I couldn’t catch the title of but it was full of people dressed as though they were in the fight scene in a medieval battle reenactment, but several of them were on motorised Segways. What festival is that? Did it begin as two siblings in a backyard? I love it!
The Bec-esque person and I discussed The Big Issue and I posited that more people read the magazine than it gets credit for. It’s known for being a globally successful social enterprise, which is excellent, but also… people seem to… read it.
After Almost-Bec left, I was walking home through the crowd of people (some carrying books home by the box full, some dressed as their favourite characters, one volunteer asleep at a stall) and I wondered what the stats were. How many out of this one hundred people in my field of vision were regular readers of The Big Issue?
Let’s underestimate and say one. One person out of all these people I can see right now is a regular Big Issue reader. Obviously it was the woman with the pink hair carrying what appeared to be a mandolin and eating a banana. But something about the thought was tugging at me and I realised its was this: in how many ways do all these people interconnect? Because a festival is wonderful on account of the central identifying element that brings you all together. But maybe some of these people would yell at some others in traffic.
In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realised there would be divisions within the group even on the topic of books. No way would the people attending the talk on romantasy want to spend their money in the military history tent (although there will be one or two, and I see you being cross to be overlooked).
This is life, though. We’re divided but together. Someone who thinks protesters should be jailed rushes to open the door of the train for a person with the pram whose court appearance for protesting is on Wednesday. We just don’t know those things until we know them, and then we peel off onto The Other Side.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m on the other side of some people I’d rather leave over there. I’m just saying that there’s something slightly surprising and very wonderful about seeing people together in one place enjoying the same thing that makes you realise they’ve all been here the whole time. It’s just that it took this, the festival, to bring us all together.
We’re all different. It’s what annoys us so much when someone pulls in front of us in traffic or forgets to bring their Segway to the mediaeval war reenactment hoverboard festival or whatever but it’s also what makes for so many possibilities. Be your own festival: browse, reflect, find the things you like about other people, have some fairy floss, and say hello to the writer at the signing table, who might even remember your name.