[title]
...according to Martin Curtis, 46.
People love the rubbish collection tractors... a little too much
‘One of our drivers was up in the Stone Circle on the Monday morning, when there’s generally a zombie apocalypse – you can imagine why – and he radioed over saying someone was hugging his tractor. The driver had to very nicely peel this gentlemen off and tell him to go hug a stone instead.’
Abandoned tents are a major problem
‘People leave behind all kinds of stuff. Wellies, cookers, boxes of beer – you name it, it’s all left here. Tents are the worst. Even large, good quality ones get left behind. It’s depressing to clear those up, but we have scout groups who come later in the week to collect tents and there are charities that take them as well.’
Other things are found amidst the chaos
‘I haven’t had to pick up anything particularly weird, but there’s that famous story about a false leg found in a long drop loo once. Why would there be a false leg in a long drop?’
The pros use massive magnets to pull tent pegs out of the ground
‘After the tents have been picked up and the camping fields have been cleaned, people go round with these magnet machines. They’re super powerful, so anything with iron in it will get pulled out of the ground. Back in the day, when they didn’t have the technology, there was an incident involving a cow swallowing a tent peg, which wasn’t good for the cow.’
People leave a scary amount of rubbish behind
‘If you laid out all the bags of rubbish collected side-by-side, you’d cover a large number of football pitches. The trailers on the back of the tractors probably fit in one ton of stuff and each driver does three or four trailers a shift, with one, maybe two shifts a day. It’s an awful lot of stuff. But you have got nearly 200,000 people attending, which is the size of a very large town or small city.’
You can visit Worthy Farm any time of the year
‘There are a small group of people who know this secret, but if you contact the festival office and they say it’s fine, you can go whenever you like. The Eavises are awesome people and they’re more than happy for people to walk around the place, as long as you respect the farm and the animals.’
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