willc.me

Whenever anyone writes about Reading they do it with a certain mystic awe. They talk of the campsites and the bands, the music and the people but all of that fails to sum up what is a truly massive and epically cool festival. They often gloss over the negatives to make the folks back home jealous. So here I’ll give you an unadulterated guide to Reading 2009 in the form of a “Cool” and “Not So Cool” list.

Cool

1. Bands – The Bands have to go in the cool list. They’re up their in shining lights, playing their hearts out. What could be cooler than playing to thousands of people who are singing your song. Crystal Castles were great, as were the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
2. Young Kids – Kids make festivals. It’s great to see them running around having a good time. Plus, you see them in droves. Normally herding their parents around with a pink cowboy hat. They are the next generation, ergo cool.
3. Sunglasses – Sunday was cloudy. Not just a little cloudy, more like the apocalypse had come and blocked out the sun. But that didn’t stop people wearing sunglasses. There was every shape and size, like some sort of government diversity advert for sunglasses.
4. Guest Area – Without a shadow of a doubt the guest area is the place to be. You don’t have to queue for the bar or food and the toilets are similar to that of a Mcdonalds in cleanliness. Which isn’t saying a lot but it’s better than using the swamps they dedicate in the arena.
5. Radiohead lights – Watching Radiohead play is always awesome. The songs going back years which are all classics. When they come on stage you know about it. Partly to do with the massive LED light display that sends you into a giddy state of euphoria.  Plus they’re “green” and don’t harm the planet.

Not So Cool

1. Throwing Shit – Possibly the most annoying thing about standing in a crowd is getting wet from people throwing bottles. It seems to be little sloaney kids trying to act out the rock cliches but if had my way I’d put snipers in the lighting gantry.
2. Sound – The sound at festivals isn’t normally that great. This year it sounded like it was organised by a group of deaf llamas. Kings of Leon and the Arctic Monkey’s both had terrible sound. They of course had a scape goat. The wind. Yeah…
3. Flags – Everyone is so over flags. Glastonbury was a nightmare because of a hoard of losers with their banners. What possesses people to carry it round all day. Then stand their swaying out of time with the music to keep it blocking the cameras for the people watching on TV. They should send security round with bolt cutters and a firing squad.
4. Neon – Not as annoying as flags, but pretty lame are the people who coat themselves in Neon. It’s not even sunny and it irritates my hangover. Did you see Facebook photos of all your annoying friends doing it last year? Maybe.
5. Cold – Festivals are meant to be hot. Well not hot but balmy. Everyone I spoke to who was camping moaned about the cold. Best to get Day tickets and go home to a nice bed and a bath. Good luck to anyone going to Bestival in 2 weeks.
6. Health and Safety – Health and safety aren’t the best bedfellows for Rock and Roll. With each passing year things get a little more “safe”. Safe isn’t sexy or glamorous. Big metal crash barriers half way through the crowd aren’t cool. Let people look after themselves. Damn Nanny State.

That was Reading. It was good this year but you couldn’t help but feel that it’s all getting a bit old. It’s the festival cliches and the sloaney kids acting them out that is slowly killing it. Them listening to Radiohead loudly saying, in their shrill public school voices, “OMG, this is like so totally uber boring, why is it so slow?” It’s less spontaneous and that in my opinion just isn’t as good. Fun for a day out though, if you don’t have to pay for it.

Recently I was perusing picture of people I went to school with. It’s strange looking back 5 years later at how people have turned out. Moreover it got me thinking how much the cliched groups change and reverse when you leave education. You think that geeks will always be geeks and “jocks” will always be jocks but it doesn’t quite pan out like that.

There were always two main groups at school. The cool kids and the uncool kids. The cool kids socialised in school. They were pretty and played sports. The uncool kids wore glasses and didn’t do their hair. They did their homework instead. In the warped microcosm of school, traits that are respected in the real world like diligence and hard work are often socially frowned upon by the cool kids in school. When they leave, it’s a different story.

First let’s look at the hot girls. The ones who carried files with hearts on around and walked in little cliques through the corridors. They bitched and didn’t work. They didn’t have to cause they were the hot girls.  They could smoke between classes and chat to the cool boys. Get some training in on trying to bag a rich husband. So what happened to them now? Well, because most of them were throwing up whilst teasing the stick thin girls, they’ve all got fat. They still hang out in their little cliques and found out that at university, you don’t bring all your friends and you’re just another average girl with nothing to say. Nobody knows who you are and nobody cares. Most likely you become some PR girl and spend all your time bitching about other PR girls trying to emulate the days when you were “the hottest girl in school”.

Compare that to the geeky girls. The girls who studied and learned. The ones who were odd shapes and sizes. The skinny gawky girls who were weird and tall are now strutting down catwalks and are splashed over shops and magazines. The fat lesbian ones are now the queen bees on the social scene. They’ve become artists and work in fashion. Because they studied they have interesting things to talk about and are doing interesting things with their lives.

And the boys. The sporty kids with dreams of becoming their football idols. The ones who learned to gain kudos with their fists and bully tactics. The guys who hung out in their crews. What of them? Well they too went to uni and found that they had to make awkward relationships with other emotionally stunted males. It was never the same as with their friends back home, who they still hang out with when they go back. When they finish uni, they go and work in an office doing finance or accountancy. They lunch with the other power males and talk about how they could’ve played cricket for England or football for Chelsea. They can’t relate to their wives and a prone to hitting them when they don’t get their way.

And the geeks? The ones who learned how to write and articulate and be charming. The ones who sat their and played violin. Well they’re now headlining at Reading and ruling the creative industries. They formed good relationships when they left school and found that all the dicks with their powerful little cliques were now timid and afraid and didn’t know how to talk to anyone.

If only we’d all known that at school. Maybe the popular kids would’ve paid a little more attention and the geeky kids would have had something to look forward to. Long live geek chic.

A mysterious package arrived yesterday. A little brown jiffy bag. Upon opening it I found my new “Barclays PINsentry”. It’s a little code generator that you put your pin into and it gives you a code to do online banking. And a lot of other stuff that I haven’t been able to work out. It’s like the enigma machine, only smaller and more difficult to use.

Let me begin earlier in the week. It was a nice warm summers day and I had to pay a cheque into the bank. Now the credit crunch is almost over, I decided to try and take control of my unwieldy finances by visiting the dreaded personal banker after putting my cheque in at the cashier.

The personal banking desks always reminds me of how I imagine the mass interrogation rooms at concentration camps must look like. Uniformed bank clerks grilling worried and frantic people about their finances. Desperate couples trying to get another loan to put an extension on their worthless house. And queues. What queues they have. At lunch time you may as well pitch a tent. Fortunately it was mid afternoon so it wasn’t that busy and I got seen to straight away. I promptly told the gremlin who served me that I wanted to start banking online. He promptly started regaling me about his family holiday in Corfu. Annoyingly. Probably part of a “let’s be nice” push after we just gave them every penny we’ve got to bail them out.

So that led to the little brown jiffy bag arriving. With the PINsentry. It’s all a bit science fiction really. That you look at your money online from your computer. Is it good or bad? On one level it’s really good as it allows you to control your personal finance more tightly. On another, it makes it feel like a computer game. I spent a good 10 minutes transfering all the money around between my accounts. Because I could. I don’t know how they’ll look at it though.

Online banking is a big problem for banks. Electronic security is notoriously hard to organise. Just look at how bad Microsoft are at doing it. And they’ve been doing it for years. Not only can they try and hack connections but they can also do identity fraud. It seems so popular and we hear about identity fraudsters so much I’m surprised Vogue and FHM aren’t publishing guides about how to be one. Can you imagine? The Tattler guide to identity fraud. This month’s must have accessories to become a glamorous bank robber.

But it’s a serious business. Last year, online fraud cost us £52.5 Million. I say us because although the banks pay, they always have a way to screw us out of the money in the end. They estimate that it costs each of us 87 pence a year each. Although, that’s a pretty good price to pay to not have to go into a drab and dreary bank. If that’s what it costs to not have to queue in Auswitch inspired rooms and hear about some creatures family holiday in Corfu then bring on the online banking!

People love Bank holidays. When I say people I mean the majority. The majority being the worker ants who work 9-5 for their whole lives. For the rest of the people, who chose not to be shackled into bondage, made into a corporate slave and plugged into the Matrix, it’s really annoying. And if people knew where Bank Holiday’s came from they’d probably hate them too.

A little history. Before 1834, there were about 33 Saints Days and religious holidays. When the industrial revolution was in full swing and the people at the top started enslaving the population they thought that this was far too many a day to have off. So they slashed it to a measly 4, 1 May, 1 November, Good Friday and Christmas Day. Although this didn’t satisfy Sir John Lubbock who was a keen cricketer. Pretty current with the Ashes eh? He was also a banker and thought bankers didn’t have enough time off to attend cricket matches. Oh what we can learn from history. Therefore Lubbock created a bill in parliament named the Bank Holidays Act 1871 to include 4 more days off to give bankers an easier life.

These days it’s translated into a more populist holiday. A chance for everyone to get a day off and put their feet up with a chance to enjoy the sun, or more normally, a complete lack of it. Bear in mind that when this Act was passed, there was no such thing as holiday days and paid leave in jobs. You were in the factory or mine on every weekday of the year bar those 8.

This Bank Holiday is characterised by Notting Hill Carnival and Reading. Which means racing back from the Reading on Sunday to hit up Carnival on Monday. It also invariably sees your Facebook inbox gets filled to the brim with 10 event invites a minute for Bank Holiday raves and all other horrible things that you can imagine. For the 9-5 set it’s another night to play at partying before going back to work.

Which creates a bit of a problem. Not working 9-5 and having a regular salary means that you have to be responsible. If you take time off then you have to make up that money somewhere else. The corporate machine isn’t wiping your bottom for you. Which is the major problem with the Bank Holiday. It’s not 4 days a year that are wasted, it’s actually 4 weeks. For if a worker drone gets another day off on a weekend and experiences a taste of freedom then they get too drunk and can’t function normally for the rest of the week. Which means if you work for a living as opposed to pushing pens then getting anything done is a nightmare as every phone call you make is answered by a tired little drone who can’t seem to get their act together.

I realise I sound like Ebenezer Scrooge but I can’t help it. It’s frustrating when nothing is open and it seems the whole world shuts down for a week just because some guy wanted bankers to have more time off to watch cricket matches. A better system would be to get rid of national Bank Holidays and add 4 statutory days onto everyone in the land’s holiday days. That way the whole country wouldn’t shut down for a day which actually lasts a week. Bah! Humbug!

Models seem to live an endless life of glamour. Jet setting around the world having their photo taken with other pretty people, and being paid to do it. It sounds like an amazing job. Well, that’s the preconception of an industry that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Public perception of modeling is the high life. Champagne and airplanes. Parties and glamour. But this naive view fails to take in to consideration anything. Modeling is a tough job. Yes, you read right, a tough job. Granted, it’s not a job that you need any braincells for. I’ve met some models who share more genetic makeup to marble than they do human beings. I remember one model who worked for “Models 1″ (said in a dreamy airy way) who I fell into conversation with at Bungalow 8.

It went like this. Will; “So are you having a good night?” Her; “Yeah.” Will; “Cool, do you go out often?” Her; “Yeah.” Will; “What do you reckon the meaning of life is?” Her; “Yeah.” Needless to say, she ended up getting off with a male model I introduced her to. I’ve always wondered what they talked about to get to the point of opening a saliva mining operation in each others mouths. I’m sure it was along the lines of, “You’re pretty, wanna make out?”, “Sure”.

I suppose it didn’t get off to a good start when I spoke to her. Inquiring where she was from she came out with some dialect not used since the neanderthals walked the earth. “Huhh”, she said. “Where?” “Huhhh”. It took me a while to work out she was trying to say “Hull” but with the annunciation of a mating walrus.

Anyway, back to topic. It’s not as fun as it seems. To get jobs you have to go to endless casting. Small rooms where you go and have people prod and poke you and make you do silly things. Successful models have to go to 6 or more a day. And you aren’t even guaranteed the job. All the while you have to carry an A2 sized portfolio filled with pictures of you looking like a doll with cards to hand out to people. Meanwhile, you have your booker calling you up saying you look too fat and that you’d get more work if you lost a little more weight. So you’re always grumpy cause you’re always hungry.

Then there are the actual shoots. Having to sit still as people do endless hours of hair and make up to make you look like a weird alien. When offered modeling gigs in the past I’ve always turned them down. There are two things that I hate above all others. Staying still and being told what to do. And there’s a lot of that in modeling.

And it doesn’t get any better as you get more successful. Instead of the tube you get taxis to the casting and instead of shoots being in and around London, suddenly you have to fly globally suffering eternally from jet lag and becoming undernourished on plane food. And having to go to parties which you don’t want to go to cause you’re tired and jet lagged. It’s one of those jobs that looks great on the surface but are actually really boring and tedious underneath. Much like the people employed in them.