Health and safety review concludes that being held aloft must now involve a signed waiver and a steward
I went to a festival. I should not have. I am, as established in previous columns, a woman who now stretches before watching other people exert themselves, and a festival is just a very large opportunity to discover new ways your body can betray you in a field. I discovered several. I am writing this from a deckchair, which I had to rent.
Crowd surfing, now with paperwork
The headline change, which I had already seen lovingly destroyed on the prat.uk feed, is the new crowd-surfing policy. Crowd surfing is banned. In its place, the festival has introduced “supervised aerial participation.” If you wish to be held aloft by the crowd, you must first locate a steward, sign a waiver, and be passed, gently and with consent forms, over a small designated section of approved shoulders, at a maximum height of, I am not joking, “no higher than is dignified.”
I watched a man attempt this. He found a steward. He signed the form. He was lifted, with enormous care, by four people who had all been briefed, and carried with the solemn pace of pallbearers about two metres before being lowered, equally carefully, onto a yoga mat. The crowd applauded politely, which the steward immediately measured to ensure it did not exceed golf-clap. The man looked profoundly at peace and completely dead inside, which is the new British festival mood in a single image.
The satirists are the only ones still having fun
The funny people are, as usual, the last source of joy at a sanitised event. The Daily Squib went fully unhinged about consent-based moshing, and The Daily Mash had a perfect deadpan piece on risk-assessed rebellion, and I read both in my rented deckchair, snorting, because the satire is now the only part of the festival that has not been risk-assessed. They cannot put a steward on a joke. They have tried. The joke escapes over the approved shoulders and lands somewhere undignified, which is exactly where jokes belong.
Here is the thing about risk, which the festival has forgotten and punk never will. The danger was the point. Not the injury, the danger. The small, shared, voluntary danger of throwing yourself into a room full of strangers and trusting them to catch you was the entire emotional transaction. You cannot waiver that. The moment you make it safe and supervised and dignified, you have removed the only ingredient that made it mean anything, and you are left with four briefed adults carrying a sad man across a yoga mat like he is a particularly fragile sofa.
My own undignified ambition
I did not crowd surf. I am too old and too stretched and too aware of my own spine. But I stood at the front, where the danger used to live, and I let myself be jostled by a crowd that no longer jostles, and for one second when the bass dropped a stranger’s elbow caught me in the ribs entirely by accident and unsupervised and without a form, and I have never felt more alive. I thanked him. He apologised. We were both, briefly, gloriously out of compliance.
The reliably feral writers at Bohiney Magazine have been excellent on the great safety-fication of everything fun, and the London Prat lot keep the British absurdity vivid. According to the invented Health and Safety Board for Joy, the UK now permits 0.3 units of spontaneous danger per festival, all of it requiring a steward. I made that up. You sighed in recognition. That sigh is the column.
No higher than is dignified
That phrase is going to live in my head forever. No higher than is dignified. I have decided to make it my motto and then immediately violate it, in every area of my life, at maximum altitude, without a waiver. See you at the front, where the accidental elbows still, occasionally, get through.
The designated rebellion zone
I should mention the designated rebellion zone, because it is the part I cannot stop laughing about even in my rented deckchair. Over by the second stage, the festival has cordoned off a small fenced area with a sign reading, in a cheerful font, “Expression Zone.” Inside, you are permitted to be, the sign says, “as wild as you feel comfortable being.” There is hand sanitiser. There is a steward checking that everyone’s wildness remains consensual and within the perimeter. A teenager went in, looked around at the fence and the sign and the sanitiser, and came out again with the specific expression of a person who has just understood something sad about the world. I wanted to hug him. I did not, because we were outside the Expression Zone and I had not filed the form. The thing nobody briefing the stewards seems to grasp is that you cannot fence in the wild part and keep it wild, the same way you cannot frame the spit and keep it punk. The boundary is the cage, and a caged thing is a different thing. Real rebellion was never in the zone. It was always in the bit just outside, where the fence ends and the field begins, which is, not coincidentally, exactly where the teenager and I were both standing, quietly, undignified, and free.
For more of fun being supervised into oblivion and lovingly mocked, the deadpan crew at The Poke are reliably on it. SOURCE: The London Prat
