The whole thing is p*ssing me off now, like it does every year.
Even with a village residents pass there are certain roads they won't let me drive along, roads that I use regularly normally.
The local taxi drivers have to pay Michael Eavis to park in a public road to pick up, roads that they've already paid to rank in by having a taxi licence. It's a rip off.
There's this myth that locals make loads of money out of the festival but it's not true. Most local people have full time jobs to do and it becomes very difficult to get to work. There are thousands of people living in Shepton Mallet and the surrounding villages and very few of them get anything out of the festival. The locals that can get time off work do litter picking for free in exchange for a
donation to a local carnival club charity.
Most local schools are closed on the Friday and Monday so people with kids have to take the day off work to look after them so they end up losing money, not making it. On the Wednesday and Thursday the school buses can't get through the traffic so school kids are left at the side of the road and end up walking home again. When you do manage to drive the school bus through the lanes the security stop you and say 'where's your residents pass?'.....
'It's a f*cking school bus you f*cking tw*t'.
The security staff are brought in from places like London and they don't know the area and give people false information about where to go and which roads to use, usually because they think it's funny.
They stop me and say 'where are you going?' and I say 'home' or 'to work' then they get arsey with me 'cos they think I'm taking the p*ss or try to tell me which way to go, idiots.
I've got to allow about an hour to do what's normally a 10 minute drive to work tomorrow.
It's true that we are given a free ticket but we're not allowed to sell it. If you don't want it they give you £155 instead, basically a pay-off to keep quiet about the bloody chaos they create. No one in Shepton Mallet gets a ticket, only residents of Pylle and Pilton.
It used to be Friday to Sunday but people started turning up on the Thursday so they started opening the gates on a Thursday, then they started turning up on the Wednesday because the gates were being opened on Thursday, so they started opening the gates on the Wednesday and guess what, they start arriving on the Tuesday now. I wonder what will happen next? We have to put up with this sh*t for 6 days now.
It would be better if it was moved to a purpose built site or scaled right down, it's way too big. Maybe they could go back to having the bands on Saturday night only and just have the Pyramid stage. Why do they have all these smaller stages? You can't watch 5 bands at the same time, it's ridiculous.
And Tesco in Shepton put their prices up during festival week, money grabbing b*stards.
I'm having this rant 'cos I just went shopping and got stopped twice by security and once by the police then had to put up with a packed shop with inflated prices
