Festival tips

If you don't want to be the person that annoys everyone at a festival follow The Mix's short, sharp, essential list for part-time field dwellers.

Festivals - where personal hygiene is sacrificed to the music gods

Stuff to keep with you at all times:

• Money (cold hard cash if you can. Guard credit cards with your life)
• Sun-block (it might help urge the rain away)
• Plastic bag (useful should rain hat/pillow/shoe protector things get muddy)
• Condoms
• Mobile phone
• Anything else valuable you can put in festival lock-ups

Camping tips:

• Decorate your tent so that you don’t accidentally stumble into someone else’s when you’re strolling up the hill utterly wasted
• Pitch up-hill so if it rains you don’t get flooded
• Camp near enough to the toilets that you won’t end up wetting yourself and far enough not to smell them
• Don’t camp under a tree as you don’t want to be struck by lightning or have it fall on you in the night
• Camp away from the path where there’s more chance of having stuff nicked and having drunk people fall over you
• Don’t bother with padlocks on your tent, it suggests to thieves you have something valuable and if they want it that much they’ll just slash your tent anyway
• Take your mud-caked shoes off before stepping into your tent to keep it clean and dry
• Make sure you take everything listed in our packing for a festival article

Festival food:

• Remember to eat and don’t go on a purely liquid diet – if you’re just drinking alcohol you’ll just end up sick and feeling lousy
• Drink plenty of water or a combination of sun and alcohol will leave you feeling dehydrated
• Have something sugary, like coca cola, to combat your hangover and give you a quick boost, then eat something carb-y and starch-y for lasting energy
• Have small, light meals that are easy to digest when you’re feeling poorly.
• Take a camping stove and pan to cook for yourself so you don’t have to shell out for ridiculously expensive food from festival vans
• Pack things which are easy to cook, like tins of beans and noodles
• Take muesli bars and dried fruit, which are full of goodness and energy
• Don’t bother taking anything that will go off really quickly

Signs that you’ve overdone it:

• You’re naked and covered in body paint from the ankles up
• People start calling you ‘Moon of Orion’ and you love it
• You mix the dance tent up with your own tent and camp down for the night next to a massive speaker stack
• You arrange to meet friends outside the recovery tent
• You’re in there shouting ‘More maestro!’ when anyone leaves the stage

Signs that you’re under-doing it:

• You’re up at day-break, clear-headed and hungry
• After the final act, you head for your tent and tuck up
• Friends keep asking you to look after their valuables
• You spend more time under the showers than in front of the stage
• You keep phoning home just to find out how things are

Festivalgoers to avoid:

• People who don’t blink, ever
• People who reek of patchouli, including their children
• People with dark glasses and earpieces
• People in Take That T-shirts
• People who stride about shouting: “Jesus says this is all wrong!”

Festivalgoers to seek out:

• Naked mud wrestlers (because it isn’t big or clever, unless someone else is doing it)
• Your mates (six hours wandering by yourself can get lonely)
• People who live in tepees (from a distance. Don’t go in, you’ll never come out)
• Bar staff that recognise your thirst and like you
• Backstage security that look the other way for the price of a pint

Ways to ensure people think you’re a twat:

• Wear a jester’s hat (Do we even need to mention this?)
• Sling handfuls of mud at passers-by
• Rope off a 20 metre-squared area round your tent for “privacy” reasons
• Smile smugly from the VIP area at the great unwashed
• Talk ridiculously loudly into your phone about how you’ve just been hanging out with your mate Rob da Bank/Nick Grimshaw/Jamie xx etc