As festival season really gets going with Glastonbury next week, we would like to know how you’re intending to handle drinking at outdoor music events this summer.
Are they a chance to let loose in the sun and have a good time? Are you reconsidering your attitude to past years? Making steps towards minimising your drinking? Doing festival season sober for the first time – or after many years of experience of navigating the figurative and literal field without alcohol?
As Guardian deputy music editor Laura Snapes wrote recently of her attempts to navigate festivals more conscientiously this summer:
Festival-drunk” is a particular kind of drunk. It tends to begin its steady pickling as soon as the sun is over the yardarm and last a good 12 hours or more. At its best, it’s a heavenly feeling: your most sparkling, sunkissed self, your close friends, the soundtrack to your lives writ large in front of you; the suspicion that Carly Rae Jepsen might be a child of God. The day is both endless but also laced with premature nostalgia for the present moment.
I don’t want to pathologise any of this or suggest that darkness lingers behind every good time. But in the underbelly of festival drinking, there is forgetting the music you’ve gone there to see, realising that buying several rounds of black cherry White Claws has left you with 67p in your bank account, throwing up, smoking when you wish you hadn’t, falling down a toilet at Glastonbury twice, being various shades of annoying to your fellow punters and, perhaps more importantly, your friends (as well as taking the health risks of binge drinking).
Let us know your plans below.
Callout
• For help with these issues, go to Adfam (adfam.org.uk); Al-Anon (al-anonuk.org.uk) or DrugFAM (drugfam.co.uk)
