This is a blog about people who get funny ideas in their head. Such people fall into various classes. On the one hand you get guys with political ambitions. At the top end its ruling the world and maybe having to kill a hundred million people to get there. Half way it’s running a country. In most places it means killing a few million and screwing everything up so that there are far more hungry people than there were before. Those are dictators rather than megalomaniacs. At the bottom end it’s a whole lot sweeter. You just tell people you’ll see them alright if they let you represent them in Parliament and earn a seriously good screw for the privilege. Then you claim expenses for doing them the favour and use the money to get your dick into whatever you fancy.
Alternatively you’ve got people with business ambitions. They get hold of other people’s money so that they can use it to make even more for themselves. At the top end they get to run banks, spend billions buying tens of thousands of wooden shacks on the American prairie then retire in haste to a luxury lifestyle when their little mistake is discovered while the people who loaned them their savings lose the lot. A bit further down you’ve got people who call themselves company directors. Their function should be to develop policy and strategy, acknowledge the shareholders as the ultimate owners and leave the managers to manage. Instead they turn into jack the lads. Vote themselves executive directors with gigantic salaries then usurp the control and ownership of the company and do whatever they like irrespective of the wishes of investors who put up the money. It’s what you might call swindling on a grand scale. Finally, at the bottom end there are people who think they’ve got a great idea for making money at music festivals. Firstly they buy a pig, take it home and roast it, then they purchase ten thousand bread rolls and five hundred sandwich loaves, put the pig on a truck, drive to Reading Rock Festival and set up a stall to sell roast pork rolls to the revellers in the certain knowledge that they’ll make a real killing!
The Reading Rock Festival annually occupies a site just outside the city. It’s basically a kind of showground comprising of a number of fields with woods round them and set in a shallow depression which, after it rains, turns into a gigantic mud-bowl. Onto this site drive thousands of vehicles owned by stallholders and festival goers alike. Stages are set up for live performances by rock groups and there are large numbers of stalls selling a wide variety of clothes, craft and hash smoking accessories. From the time we drove onto the site it rained and turned cold. We were in a flat grassy field right in the middle of the Thames Valley where at the end of September the nights were freezing after eleven o’clock and a thick icy mist hung over the whole area till seven next morning. The stalls were all mixed together. It wasn’t a case of craft in one place and food in another. Next to us was a strange kind of rig with a dirty great roasted pig stuck on a spit behind tables full of paper plates, napkins and jars of apple sauce.
The people who come to the Reading Rock Festival are a curious mixture. Most are fans of hard rock music. No jazz or Cliff Richards Bachelor Boy stuff thank you very much and no Rap or Iggy Pop. There were Country and Western characters. Seventy year old women in rhinestone made up to look twenty and act it at night in their tents with their geriatric husbands in jeans and Roy Rogers hats. There were heavy metal rockers with their ladies in carefully ripped black fishnet tights on Speed and Vodka along with loads of middle-aged leather. Every class of music fan had its associated uniform.
Late afternoon of the first day two drunks high on amphetamines threw one of our paste tables up in the air which meant us having to pick up hundreds of crystals, earrings and trees scattered all over the grass, clean them up and put them back on the stall. That night some merry fellow smashed a glass cider bottle on my head without having the slightest provocation. Lucky I was wearing a thick Donegal Tweed cap, but then that was the Reading Rock Festival. Hard core trouble never far away!
Meanwhile our halogen lights were revealing a pretty grim picture next door. There’d been a few shallow cuts in one of the legs of pork. Despite the proximity of a cider stall no-one seemed to be buying. Well that night its owners would be eating better than us.
The following day passed slowly. Sounds of guitars and drums from the Main Stage in the next field. Our sales moved slowly. Mainly personalised frogs glued on marble… From John to Mum, Reading Rock Festival and the date! Next door little was happening. The occasional roll going but no great queue at lunchtime and the first appearance of seriously long faces. His wife already looked badly fed up and by six that evening rather cross We could hear raised voices coming from their caravan that night. It was difficult to understand… People needed to eat and there were lots of hungry people on site. They couldn’t all be eating veggie burgers and flapjacks. It wasn’t that kind of place. Rather-more pie and mash, jacket potatoes and chilli. So why weren’t the roast pork rolls moving?
We took turns wandering around on the second day. Checking out the craft stalls and thinking of food. That roast port really smelled good so why hadn’t we bought anything yet? It was a fair question. There were only three other food stalls in the next field and four further on. The roast pork man must have checked it out for himself. Why wasn’t anyone buying his stuff? The arguments that night in the caravan sounded desperate, the poor fellow taking serious stick from his wife… She’d told him not to do it… They shouldn’t have gone there at all… Next morning, the Saturday, we were struck by a singular phenomenon. Large numbers of people heading our way from the big Entrance Gate at the end of the field holding bulky Sainsbury’s carrier bags. This was certainly of interest. There were simply too many of them to ignore. One passed close to our stall. “Been to Sainsbury’s?” I asked affably. And sure enough he had. Sainsbury’s, bless their grubby little socks, had opened a new supermarket just a few days ago only ten minutes’ walk down the road. Their charcuterie did just about everything including whole roast chickens, racks of Chinese pork ribs, pies, sausages, samozas, you name it. Then there were the plates of sliced roast pork, turkey and ham at the deli. Did they also do packs of rolls and baps we wondered?
A new Sainsbury’s just down the road! The man, his wife and the pig had travelled all the way down from Newcastle and unbeknown to the living they were doomed before they even set out. Desperation! That lunchtime the price of a roast pork roll went down from two-fifty to a quid. The owner of the dead pig must have picked up the tale. Little George Washington with big ideas was facing a multinational!
By three that afternoon the procession of Sainsbury’s carrier bags had turned into a regular flow. An endless stream of festival goers returning through the gate, bags packed with cooked food, walking straight past the roast port entrepreneur without giving his stall so much as a glance. Entirely oblivious to the smell in the air of porcine succulence. Ever had a leg of pork for Sunday lunch? You know what it’s like when the oven door’s opened and coming out of the kitchen is that wonderful odour. That promise, with roast potatoes and parsnips, of something touching the divine. The cider’s been in the freezer and now it’s on the table along with the cork mats and plates. In it comes on a platter and your wife carves off the best roasted end especially for you. Your reward for being a loving husband and a good father. Well, they were walking past that smell, that dream, without even turning a hair. You couldn’t beat a whole roasted chicken for two-fifty!
Sunday lunchtime the roast pork rolls went down to eighty pence. We could check the success of his gambit from behind our stall. The pig still had four legs though one looked a bit chipped. Desperation! Only twenty-four hours left to do the business. Turn the great idea into a killing that would make even The Dragons consider investing. Eighty grand for 200 roast pork stalls! Taking the whole thing nationwide! Two hundred cardboard cut-outs of Deborah Meaden looking fetching in a little white chef’s hat smiling encouragingly down the leg of a pig as she cuts off a slice! Twenty-four hours to sell out and tell the Dragons about your brilliant idea. Today the television studio, tomorrow the world!
The roast pork man’s wife was becoming increasingly bitter. The recriminations flowed thick and fast and it wasn’t confined to the caravan anymore. It was out in the open. Poor roast pork man. Whistling a happy tune down the Great North Road all unsuspecting.
Happy is the Man who Begins His Journey on Wings... Ancient Chinese Proverb… No, I just made it up! And it’s a load of old bollocks anyway. Wasn’t there some Greek guy called Icarus who got over-ambitious? Never mind. The supermarket had to close its doors some time or other. And then…
It didn’t! Not till four that afternoon anyway and by that time supplies of nosh bought earlier in the day were still awaiting consumption in the tents. The man came over occasionally to talk to us. He was mid-thirties. His wife a teacher, he a civil servant. Was this our first time at Festivals? They’d never done markets before. Louise and I looked at each other and felt a real pang of pity. I picked up a fine garnet willow and gave it to him. A little gift for his lady, from myself and my wife. Yes, we were market traders. Regulars at Festivals, but my wife was also a student. Writing up her doctorate. I wrote novels whenever I could. The markets helped finance both. He was as astounded as we were. Reading Rock was a bad place to start and the lesson was always the same. If you get an idea, check out the competition before you do anything else.
That night things went a little better for them. Half a leg gone. As for ourselves we’d run out of frogs but the crystals and earrings were shifting. Pack up time was Monday midday. He was still there early afternoon doing whatever he could. Rolls down to fifty pence, any takers? There were a few late munchers but by this time the pork was stone cold and the fat congealed something nasty. We heard his wife muttering something about dumping it on the motorway. Pork didn’t reheat well, that was for sure. If they didn’t the cats up in Newcastle would be licking their chops, or rather the pigs! Meeeow!
They pulled out just before we did, pig on its back with three legs in the air. Before leaving the lady came over to thank us. Selling food on a market was tough, we commiserated. They should just write it off to experience. Maybe they did. We never saw them again, anywhere.
It took us two hours to pack up and join the queue of vehicles leaving the site through deep mud, searching for any sign of a pig over the next three or four miles. It was probably floating down a river somewhere that night. Funny that! On the way home I really fancied one of those roast pork rolls and somehow I’d just never bought one. Missed your chance now! … Louise said with a twinkle.
Some people have really funny ideas. A life is a life so thank God it was only a pig… That is considering the history of the world and what some funny ideas have led to.
