Slowly creepin in

Turning thirty is a weird one. As soon as you make it past the quarter century, every year that passes seems like the countdown of a death sentence. Then, at 29, you all of a sudden realise you don't give a shit. The looming conclusion to a decade that was fraught with indecision, bad hangovers and debt realisation suddenly doesn't seem so confronting. In fact, it could even be good. Saturday mornings could be spent reading the paper instead of trying to darken ones room and quieten ones sing-song birds. Books could be read, clubs joined. Hell, even embroidery could be discovered by those more crafty individuals in our midst.

It does pay to actively ignore the fact that these little epiphanies are most likely the body's natural reaction to dealing with the inevitable end of one's youthful exuberance, but by thunder, ignoring shit is easy. After all, there's always alcohol; natures fail-safe brainwasher!

What certainly doesn't help when approaching the so called dirty (translation: grotty) 30s is to be reminded by ones well-meaning (translation: piss-taking) friends that there are in fact some drawbacks to getting older. Such as how tired and old you've been looking recently. Or how many hours of being 20 you have left. Or how many you have now. Or how interesting it is that the steak you are currently eating will be the last one you will ever eat during your misspent youth. Fuckers.

As is what happened to our dear friend Patty last weekend when we decided to celebrate his 30th birthday in Copenhagen, Denmark. The plan of attack was simple: Go to Denmark with the aim of going to the Roskilde festival, setup camp, and proceed to get completely wasted on duty-free vodka to the backdrop of some of the worlds best bands. By heck, even a monkey would split his bananas on a plan this salubrious.

One problem. Roskilde was experiencing one of it's 'wet' years. I'd never even heard of the phenomenon until I was informed of it's existence one week too late via the quintessential street mag Vice. What this 'wet year' equated to was the crew getting blasted with record breaking torrential rains, fortunately for me, the day before i arrived. Their eventual response to which was to retreat back to the comfort of an opportunistically priced Copenhagen hotel. I know you're thinking what complete festival pussies they were by boo-hooing over a little rain, but let me break it down for you one time homie:

• Stinking mud as far as the eye can see.
• One foot deep flood water (+ piss + rubbish + vomit) in and around the camp site.
• Completely wet and freezing EVERYTHING
• Broken phones, cameras, passports, wills to live

The short term solution was much like the usual fare - drink shitloads and ignore the problem. The plan worked peachy until Pat and Amy retired for the night to find their air mattress floating in a one foot tent puddle of water and begotten festival crap.

The scene erupted.

"What are we gonna do?"
"I dunno! What are we gonna DO?"
"How should I know? WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO?"
"Fuck i DUNNO! WHAT ARE WE GONNA TO DO?"

*Splash*

"Fuck it I fell over in this CRAP!"
"Don't bump our tent Patty!"
"FUCK YOU GREG!"

And so it goes. Now, is the colloquial term 'Happy campers' supposed to sound so sarcastic? My kroners are on 'yah'.

Patty's actual 30th was the following night in the hotel. We thoroughly irritated the very patient guy down at the front desk with numerous requests for ice, convinced some Nordic thrash metal band that we were Basement Jaxx (nooooo, there's THREE people in our band. Do your research, Evald.) and probably should have called it quits after breaking the bedside lamp and deciding to send it down to our friend in reception via the lift. I say SHOULD have called it quits, because 2 seconds later we also broke the bed. In our defence, closer inspection the following morning revealed that it had already been broken by some nefarious individual on a previous occasion. So that, like, basically means we did nothing wrong. Anyway, it wasn't anything a bit of gaffer tape didn't fix, and even though the people whose bed it was had to sleep on a sagging bed after we broke it, it's still gotta be better than shivering your ass off on an inflatable island approximately one midget square surrounded by a sea of sheep poo mud and the potential of contracting projectile dysentery.

But then, i can think of at least one other thing better than that.