My 2011 Summer

Hands up if when you look back on your summer, you had a good time!?
Because I know I did.

From the end of May until mid-September I’ve been on holiday. So there were days at home rummaging through Virgin Media TV choice on demand, scouring through the various channels only to spend the whole day on music channels and I might have even had a plan of what I watched when I woke up. If I was up early enough on a weekday I’d watch Home Under The Hammer at 10am, if not I woke up to The Maury Show at 11am, then music channels until E! News at 1pm and then yes, back to the music channels going up and down and up and down every ten minutes.

Or I was at work, with models (men, women, kids), steaming clothes, chatting to different kinds of people, eating really bad canteen food and singing along to out-dated 80's music that I love. Or, I was wristbanding random strangers outside the BBC studios in White City, London, getting them into some of my favourite shows.

Aren't they pretty?!

At one point in my summer, I was managing a gate at Pride London Parade in the middle of Piccadilly Circus.
Picking up (for the first time) a speaker and getting near a thousand people to do the Mexican wave up and down each side of the barriers while the rest of my group, people I had only met a half an hour before, cheered me on. A gay guy asked me for a hug after as well as some girls asking me to take a picture with their Pride Teddy-bear; I’ve never felt so wanted before in my life.
Switch to, telling randomers that they couldn’t cross the road because if they didn’t notice there was a parade going on and though I understood that they had to go to their theatre showing, the parade stopped in a couple of minutes and only then could I let them through. Insert here the swear words, the pushing and the crushing of poor little me. Oh, and a transvestite called Tina who reminded me of a Army captain by the barks of ordering when things got a little too hard for me to manage myself. I did mean to say me to manage because in the middle of Piccadilly Circus at my first ever Pride I was managing a team of five to guard the gates, the ‘manager’ was sitting on the floor without a care in the world.
A day of volunteering meant a night time of parties and at 7.30am the next day I strolled into my house.

I went out quite a bit; I went to a Single Launch in London Bridge. Again, the best friend and I unlocked her door at nearly 6am that Sunday. A couple of birthday parties, drinking pitchers for myself and I may have forgotten that they were meant for sharing, house parties with rows and arguments, girly nights in talking nonsense until one in the morning.
BBQ's, family parties, hungover days, football matches... you get the jist.

Another volunteering experience of the summer was at a brilliant festival called LEEFEST. Started by a young 17year old (named Lee obviously) who, after his parents told him not to have a house party decided to stage a festival in his back garden in 2006. Now he has the likes of Fenech – Soler, DJ Fresh, Get Cape Wear Cape Fly (who waved at me!), The National, The Holloways and The Young Knifes and also, a ton of unsigned acts that will explode onto the music scene soon! By The Rivers were my favourite by far, look on their Myspace, they’re touring with The Specials.

A new friend and I at Leefest!

If you can imagine, a gorgeous budget festival with wonderful people walking around, free Nandos, joking around with bubbly girls I met that day, not being too friendly with the Event Management girls (who decided to boss us around and didn’t realise who she was talking to, AKA Me. I had managed the car park the day before without her I think I could do it again).

A group of volunteering girls who thought that volunteering meant not doing any work and left our group of six to do all their shifts; gawping at Lee himself for being utterly cool riding on the back of a mini open top 4x4 (no doubt about it this guy oozed coolness without trying but the 4x4 helped) and end the weekend by discovering two 11year olds at the front of DJ Fresh and barricading ourselves around them from being washed away into the huge mosh-pit.

Fast forward a few weeks as I travel up to Bournemouth to check out my brand new house (a post on that later)! Two days later, a 10am start at IKEA to buy cool stuff to go with the house. I wonder the whole way around IKEA thinking of whether the colour scheme this year should be purple or black, white and orange…

However, news got round to my work that I wasn’t leaving just yet and so now, it’s one week of partying, another week of full on work. More cash for the partying I guess…

Now, who else wants to share?


LINKS: http://www.pridelondon.org/
http://www.leefest.org.uk
http://www.myspace.com/bytherivers

Survival of a University Student =)

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