All Other Districts

I must admit that I’m getting a little bit jealous when I see all the folk clubs and even small folk festivals that that are starting to happen in the UK. The real world is beginning to make an appearance. It makes me think about all the UK festivals I went to in the 1990s. All those happy memories

Except for the ones that weren’t…

Redditch Folk Festival. Ah yes – the one I very nearly didn’t go to. Here’s what I wrote about it in 2015:

All Other Districts

There’s a sign in one of our island stores that says “Why are you rushing? This is an island. You’re only going around in circles.” It reminds me of the man in England who apparently drove all the way round the M25 (London’s Orbital Motorway – 117 miles) thinking he was heading north on the M1 to Newcastle-upon-Tyne 283 miles away.

I suppose he was enjoying the ride, or at least he was until he began wondering who’d moved Newport Pagnell and where all the Geordies were. At that stage I suppose he decided to ask for directions and learned the horrible truth. If anyone had told him to relax, he was just going around in circles, he’d probably have tipped his motorway service station fried eggs down their neck.

Funny isn’t it, when you consider that ring roads must have been invented to make our lives easier. Well that’s what I thought…

When I was living in England I drove from Wokingham, Berkshire to Redditch, Worcestershire to go to Redditch Folk Festival. I had done my homework. I had a plan.

a) Find festival site and register.
Easy! Paid up and branded, I returned to my car for part “b”.

b) Find B&B to dump luggage.
No problem I thought, and the festival program even had a very helpful map of the immediate area. It made things look much simpler than the route I had carefully researched and planned the night before. “Oh well if you can go up there first and then across, then take the first right and third left, it’s going to save me lots of time…” And off I went.

Two hours and one error in the festival’s map later (“then across” didn’t exist, turning the rest of their map and mine into total gibberish), I was just about to give up and go back to Berkshire when I finally managed to get the bed and breakfast owner on the other end of my trusty Motorola Startac with one hand, while steering around the 57th roundabout with the other (I didn’t dare turn off the ring road to stop or I’d still be there now). 

“Look, I’ve been driving round Redditch for two hours. The last person I asked said ‘you can’t possibly miss it, just take the first left off the next roundabout and Haddenuff Common is right there’ AND IT WASN’T. The first left said M6 and the only other choice said ‘all other districts’ and if you don’t tell me where the hell I am right now I’M GOING TO GRETNA GREEN.” 

After many fraught exchanges like “where are you now? What can you see?” and “Oooh I don’t know that roundabout, are you sure it’s a Royal Mail Sorting Office and not a swimming pool?” and “You’re sure there’s no 3rd turn off that roundabout – oh my God they’ve built another roundabout since Tuesday”, I managed to find it while she “talked me in” like a limping aircraft. I never forgot those roundabouts. I still wake up in the middle of the night, shouting “Oh no! I was told to head for Birmingham here and I never heard of Bees End, Wormwood Bank or Maggot Hill and if I go for ‘all other districts’ I’ll never find my way out again, so I’d better go on to the next roundabout. Now what’s this one say – aah – ‘Overunder Meadow, Great Carbuncle, Splutterbottom Bog or all other districts’… Oh shit, now I’m on the motorway heading back to London.” 

Sorry. Where was I? Oh yes –

c) Return to festival.
I spent the weekend in my room, terrified to go out in case I never found my way back again.

No, not really. I did manage to make it back to the festival site once the landlady and I had diagnosed the fatal flaw in the program’s street map. However if I expected sympathy from the festival locals and regulars when I told them about getting lost in Redditch then I’d another think coming.

Snorts of laughter. “Oh everyone gets lost here. We live in Redditch and we get lost all the time!”

There was no Wikipedia in those days, otherwise I might have been forewarned:

“Redditch is occasionally noted for its confusing road system dominated by a system of dual carriageways.”

If you ask me that’s a bit like saying Adolf HItler was occasionally noted for being a little bit bossy. And look at this!

“…the story of an elderly couple admitted to hospital with severe dehydration after spending more than sixty hours trying to navigate the highway system is an urban legend.”

Hmm, Wikipedia. Are you sure?
It doesn’t say whether they were looking for the Folk Festival at the time.