No teddy bears for me...

I won’t be attending the Electric Picnic this year, words that I thought Id never utter without heart wrenching disappointment and yearning. Ive gone every year, scraping together ticket money and packing wigs, sausages and clothes for all occasions to live in the sublime little world that Stradbally becomes for one weekend of the year. I look forward to meandering through groups safe in the knowledge that this is the cream of the country, the accepting, the fun loving and the cool. I relish making sure my hair is redder than Ronald McDonald and not using my phone for three days, meeting new people, seing improbably cool and interesting acts and people. I even wed my boyfriend two years ago in the blow up chapel, an emotional affair culminating in the exchange of lager cans. I have savoured the delights of hot showers in family camping and cleaning up doughnuts vomited by ten year olds at 4 am. But not this year. I have received a long summer of promotional emails and adverts, telling me all that has been added, but what has been taken away, Picnic gods?

When all is said and done price is the biggest obstacle. We used to save up and take the picnic as our yearly holiday, this year, when everything else is hurting, a €480 price tag for entry just isn’t in the coffers..each year we dutifully spent out first night at the festival collecting discarded glasses from the camp sites all night, this usually netted us spending money to enjoy the rest of the festival albeit tired from working our way through till 8 am.

The lineup: when the pill munching fiends of the nineties get bored in their late 30’s and 40’s it must be time to regroup....money to be made, festivals to be played, t-shirts to be bought. This years headliners have a long way to go before they reach the dizzying heights of cool that were Kraftwerk, Röyksopp, Nick Cave, Sonic Youth, New Order, Björk, Beastie Boys, The Stooges, The Chemical Brothers, The Flaming Lips, Sigur Rós of yesteryears. Given that this years’ line up is not as big as before and unlikely to have cost promoters as much , and the Dear Leader keeps telling us that costs have dropped throughout Ireland inc. it seems excessive that the picnic has not come down.

I’ve gone every year since 2004 without fail, I’ve partied with the best of them, I’ve laughed and cried and enjoyed the picnic, and it was something that I hoped I would never have to pack into a box and tuck away in the attic with the rest of the heady excesses of my late twenties and early thirties. I shall miss buying cans off a hippie in the woods late at night, or meeting strangers who share their smoke in return for company and giggles. The picnic has the unique ability to create groups where there was never groups before, to bring people together and make them feel like they are part of something bigger. But not this year, by keeping ticket prices the same they have sought a pound of flesh from thirty something’s who will find it easier to justify toasting that pound by their hearth and not a single use barbeque. It is a shame that for many people that enjoyed its beauty, its freedom of expression and its ethos it won’t be a ray of sunshine in an otherwise dreary Ireland.