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Orange jacket bloke at entrance to V2003 arena: You can’t bring that in here [points to 2 litre plastic water bottle in my hand]
Me: Why not? We brought it in yesterday. [This is true]
Orange jacket bloke: Well you must have hidden it or something. [This is not true]. You can’t bring that in here. If you look on the back of your ticket it says you can’t bring more than 1 litre of water in here.
Me: Why not? What do you think I’m going to do with a large bottle of water?

Orange bloke: That’s not my problem, there’s plenty of water inside.
Me: Yes. That we have to pay for. That’s why we just queued for 20 minutes at the campsite’s only tap to fill this one up.
Orange bloke: There’s plenty of taps in there [This is also not true. But I didn’t find that out until much later – it hadn’t been a problem the previous day because we’d been able to take in our large bottle of water – after searching for the first aid point (that we only knew about because Rhys had earlier found it) for a good half an hour, during which time we were sent the wrong way by at least 3 orange blokes who had no idea where there was free water (or were under the misguided impression that the arena was positively drowning in taps, if you’ll excuse the pun). The free water/first aid point was conveniently hidden behind the dance tent in an empty corner of the arena field. Without signposts. Funnily enough the stalls selling small bottles at £2 a go were highly prominent.]

The first thing that you have to remember about the V festival is that it’s not Glastonbury. Budweiser is £3 a can. You have to queue to buy beer tokens so that you can then stand in a bigger queue to exchange those tokens for warm, fizzy beer. Don’t like Budweiser? Or Virgin Coke? Sorry, well you won’t be drinking anything else. You also won’t be taking any of your own food or drinks inside. You can buy hamburgers that taste of plastic at “high-street prices” inside instead (although I’m not quite sure which high street it is that sells small burgers for £3.50 a go). Interestingly, you can take in as many drugs as you need to; I saw enough coke being snorted over the weekend to coat most of the £10 notes in London. Presumably it’s ok to take that in because there isn’t a stall inside selling Virgin-branded drugs at several times the going rate.

As I said yesterday, though, once we got over the blatant profiteering and silly rules, it was still a great weekend. The Super Furries were probably my band of the weekend (they played The Man Don’t Give a Fuck and Herman Loves Pauline), but I also enjoyed seeing Ash give one of their better performances, as well as The Cardigans, The Coral and Shack (although Mick Head’s vocals were worryingly off-key in places, and he was babbling incomprehensible scouse inbetween songs). The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, even though I’m not a particularly big fan, provided a suitably large end to the festival.

Now I just have to deal with the dreariness of being back in the real world. Again.
I might be able to wash regularly and not have to queue to get near a bathroom, but I think I’d still rather be at the festival. Still, at least it’s a short week for me as I’m off on holiday on Friday.