Camp Bestival, urban myths and Mr Tumble

Camp Bestival gave me festival whiplash. I’d had exactly 2 nights to recover and could barely shuffle to the venue. The death glares on the train as I hustled gracelessly with my camel-hump backpack through rush hour and taking up far too much space cut me like paper. I hadn’t clocked the demographic of camp Bestival when I applied … younger than I anticipated. Like “Mr Tumble as a headline” levels of younger. That also meant that the people I was working with were getting paid because there weren’t enough volunteers to tide over the job. Most of the guests were that breed of “trendy start up mum/dad” where parents refuse to let their age catch up with them by maintaining a modern job in a tech start up or a gentrified street food business specialising in avacados and dyeing their hair a crazy colour in order to forget the fact they are in their late 30s/early 40s in an office half their time.

I was dropped off by the staff buggy and saw a flash of a Swansea hoodie. There was a kneejerk grin, a fellow Welshman! I later explained that I wasn’t a psychopath for grinning the moment I saw her, and our conversations trailed from wales to genuine friendship. Somewhere along the line I met Eilish (pronounced like Billie Eyelish), a woman who somehow managed to fry her accent worse than mine. She was short and pale with borderline Scandinavian blonde hair. Our jokes managed to evolve into in-jokes, the most prominent involving Mr Tumble as a sexual icon, Mr Tumble as a dominatrix (mistress tumble), the Venga-boys, and a horrific merging of Mr Blobby (the 90s children’s show character) and the Slender man, (a photoshopped urban myth from the internet era.)

During my ticketing shift I explored with my customers what qualifies an adult ticket (aside from age), mostly suggesting that it was getting excited by Ikea cookware or enjoying scotch or something. Understanding a tax form perhaps? I’m surprised my teammate didn’t hit me after the 6^th hour of the same joke over and over.

I found cheesy chips spicy when they were laughably tame, I was lead on a wild goose chase by an online dating stranger who was not actually in the venue they claimed to be, and I saw a circus performance. There were a few overlapping people going from festival to festival, including a young French lad who was learning English through travelling Britain, and a manbunned festival enthusiast who was telling me in detail about how he’s attended smaller versions of burning man. Maybe one day I’ll go to the Spanish burn (was it called nowhere?) because it sounds really awesome.

I’m harsh about this festival but its also the

festival that brought me “Elvana”, a nirvana cover band lead by an Elvis impersonator with long dip-dyed red and black hair. He had a stage persona and kept the accent inflections that the original Elvis would have sang throughout his weird vintage mashup, with two vintage cheerleaders with beatnik bobs singing back-in music. It was a combination that I never expected but am glad exists out there in the world somewhere, goodluck Elvana wherever you are. Furthermore Mr Tumble had more of a stage presence than most of the acts I saw that month, including Lana Del Rey and Jess Glynne.