Reading Festival,
Cancelled
Ok calm down, not really.
I'm just not going. I just can't afford it (the woes of a student) and although it was the one I was most looking forward to, it also had a flip side of scaring me a little.
The news reports of the Sunday riots, the general crowd dynamic (wow my lecturer would be impressed with me whipping out that term) just worry me especially as I would be expected to deal with these situations and if my 2 festivals with Oxfam have taught me anything it would be this: Don't expect to learn anything until you have to deal with it.
This can be fine, you can't brief about every eventuality in a 20 minute chat before you go on shift and for Download and Glastonbury this was more often than not perfectly adequate. But I can just imagine being faced with a crowd issue, like surging, or the large amount of unsafe fires that Reading is infamous for without any backup, support or prior training other than a video of a man tackling a bucket fire with a fire extinguisher and how this is not appropriate because the force just knocks it over and only last about 2 seconds.
So yes, no Reading for me. My stint with Oxfam is done.
BUT bring on End of the Road!
You don't need to deal with anything like that at Reading with Oxfam, they don't even do the campsites.. there is fire stewards plus security and CAT's in the campsites to look after them :-)
ReplyDelete@Paultrademark "this year fires in the arena were banned, with groups of Oxfam stewards with fire extinguishers on hand to combat any festival goers attempts to light fires." From http://www.efestivals.co.uk/news/10/100830a.shtml
ReplyDeleteSo yes, although I didn't actually mention campsite fires, Oxfam did have to deal with fires this year albeit in the Arena.
Unless you actually worked at Reading this year and can tell me otherwise?