Part 1 of 3 - Materialism

A couple of weeks ago I went to Reading Music Festival. You can learn a lot about society from a music festival, particularly what is wrong in our strange world of materialism, chav wankers and the falling economy of the Mediterranean states of the Euro-zone.

Part 1 of 3 - Materialism

What has all this to do with a sandwhich? Well that’s easy; I was eating an over-priced roast pork and apple baguette as I sat there in the mud making these observations. A waft of urine added depth to the soggy pig meat and runny apple sauce dribbled down my arm, searching out my paper cup clad pint of Tuborg that I almost spilt when I sat down with seven quids worth of bland sarnie.

The sun drifted in and out of clouds that drifted from grey to white to grey again. It had been raining and the fields were down trodden in compressed but drying mud. People were milling about waiting for the next band, most wearing rain coats and wellies as a staple part of the 2011 summer season trend. The boys accompanied these items with jeans that refused to reach up to their boxers. The girls matched flowered wellies and raincoats with tight short jean shorts and knee length socks (boys, minds out of the gutter please... this is serious...)

Nothing special in that, I may hear you say and you’d be right. What’s the big deal in all these young (and older) people enjoying Great British Stiff Upper Lip Syndrome and finding fun in the mud, rain and cold on that August Bank Holiday weekend? And apart from the group of lads dressed up as Wally (Where’s Wally? Well over there with his twenty brothers.) and the odd Borat mankini clad, far too trollied to even realise his mates had dressed him in it, drunken idiot, there is nothing special in it... Apart from the Hunters wellington boot.

The more I looked about the crowds. Whether that was whilst walking from one stage to another, or queing up for a cheeky falafel pitta, I noticed these designer wellies every where.

And these things cost eighty odd quid a pair... for wellies... I know, eight-bloody-quid... WTF!!!

At first I thought it was the odd ‘show off in a group of sixteen year old girls’ here or a ‘mummy’s boy from the somewhere-on-the-thames’ there but I was wrong, there were groups of friends milling about and all of them had the Hunters stamp on the front of their green or red or striped or flowered wellington boots. I noticed groups of Hunter clad girls buzzing about like a swarm of pretentious moths wishing they were butterflies and you could tell the poor friend, with her Primark short jean shorts and wellies from Go-Outdoors.

I even wondered whether wearing the wrong boot may hold you back in these circles of trendy youths. I heard two girls talking about a boy one of them fancied but nothing would ever happen because... and I quote, “He’s wearing Dunlop wellies.”

DUNLOP WELLIES... When I was a kid if your mum bought Dunlop you were the man... Now you can’t get laid because the designer label on your water proof footing matches the tyres on your dads Volvo estate.

But then you have to wonder why not? When I was young I loved my wellies, splashing about in puddles on the way to collect the family allowance with Mum from the local post office. When I was a boy, I loved the wellies I wore when I went fishing, no worm was safe in the estuary mud as I baited up for a Sunday afternoon. But when I was a teenager you wouldn’t have caught me in wellies for love nor money.

But maybe teenagers need rubber footwear like never before. Obviously there are never more of these boots on show then at a music festival and if kids need these items for their weekends of music, rain, mud and booze then why shouldn’t there be a designer welly that becomes so desirable it is now the norm’ to pay eighty odd quid for wellington boots. At a glance the average thirty nine year old’s initial reaction would be one of amazement and as I showed distaste for the excesses and foolishnesses of the stupid, I asked “Why would anyone pay so much for a bloody wellington boot?”

The reply I got was, “I don’t know, probably for the same reason why someone would pay seven quid for a pork roll.”