Guy and Sagarika
For reasons that probably seemed pretty valid in whichever content meeting this was dreamed up in, the Observer has done an extra Blind Date column today. In Glastonbury. It’s Glastonbury at the moment. You may be unaware.
I look forward to future editions of Blind Date taking place at other all-pervading cultural events. At The X Factor final, perhaps, or during the next austerity march.
Read what happened on the ‘date’ – they basically stood next to each other watching Hot Chip for a couple of hours – between 40-year-old Guy, an IT project manager, and Sagarika, 29, a textile designer. They’ve got to be the two most Glastonbury-ready job titles I have ever heard in my life.
“I wanted to appear in a magazine.”
“Instead I did this.”
Guy obviously didn’t get the memo that Glastonbury uniform is no longer a kaftan but a carefully curated wardrobe of outfits including feather boas, denim cut-offs slashed to the cervix/scrotum and a light dash of cultural appropriation via a head-dress or a bindi. Kaftan? Get with the PG, daddio.
“What’s this old man doing at Glasto?” – you know she says Glasto, right? – “I thought it was going to be young cool people like me vibing off each other and pretending that queasy feeling was coming up on a pill and not food poisoning.”
If you’re out of Nytol ever, and don’t have a piano handy to drop on your head to knock you out, ask someone about their first time at Glastonbury and how muddy it was. I have a friend whose first time at Glastonbury was so disgusting and horrible, she should go into schools giving talks about it – that is the kind of Glasto tale I like to hear.
“Yeah so this fossil droned on about his first time at Glastonbury and then we danced a bit and BTW did I mention I was young?”
This isn’t so much a date as just, kind of, like, being vaguely in the same location as someone for a specified amount of time. Text messages from my bank have more warmth and intimacy.
“I tried to ditch him for ages but he kept popping back up like a body in the river – still doing all that dancing.”
There is no table manners question obviously because they didn’t eat anything, except maybe “disco biscuits” as I bet Guy would describe them.
Instead, there is a question about music taste which never fails to make any date go off a cliff.
I like Hot Chip but I have never ever met anyone who would describe them as being their favourite. Thankfully, Sagarika inexplicably thinks this lends Guy an air of cool. It doesn’t last.
What a time to be alive.
Some. Mean. Shapes.
I am dying at Guy’s “totally with-it estate agent kicking back at next door’s barbecue and trying not to make any jokes about race or gender” awkward-speak.
We have all been Guy. Or, one day, we will.
“A good energy.” Like ruffling the hair of a child that’s just daubed its own faeces on the desk during a spelling test and giving them a gold star. 7 out of 10. That burns. In short: Guy can’t dance.
“Roll with”? I didn’t realise Sagarika was Wu-Tang.
“One of my favourites.” Hot Chip, Goan fish curry – this bloke liked everything you like five years ago.
I am from Yorkshire. Are there any, errrr, Yorkshire pudding stalls at Glastonbury? What would I do to introduce someone clumsily to my culture?
Not to mention your breath honking of fish curry – a passion assassin if ever I heard one.
I’m glad they got really fun people to do this. Imagine if they’d tried it out with a less scintillating duo; where would be now?
We would be here. Right here.
What is the spirit of the festival, exactly? I assume he means taking all the drugs on the first night and telling everyone what the mud was like in Glastonbury 1997, spending the second trying to find more and then the third swaying to Hot Chip croaking your way through forced pleasantries with someone 11 years your junior who thinks you’re a shit dancer.
I Lost My Voice From Partying – the never-released potential hit single from Mini Viva.
Hot Chippy.
Y’all smoke a doobie up there, Guy? Did you say something was “epic” and then wax lyrical about how you dream of jacking it all in and launching an app for fish curry recipes, all from a shack in a beach in Goa.
“He wouldn’t leave. It got really mortifying. We had to pretend there’d been an emergency back at my tent so we could sneak off and get a pulled pork ciabatta.”
Probably because you kept urgently searching over his shoulder for your spaced-out pals every time he opened his mouth to speak to you.
OK. Guy, you want to pin a rosette to this turd of a date? Give us your score?
Fine. Sagarika?
What a load of old pony.
“His dancing, however, I was fine to rate – and that was 7/10 just in case you’ve forgotten.”
He DJs. Of course.
Maybe he’ll leave a Goan fish curry or a Hot Chip ‘CD’ under your pillow.
Now that’s over, thank God, to the pyramid stage! I have a really big flag with “IMPECCABLE” printed on it and a million trustafrians’ views to ruin.
Note: All the comments I make are based on the answers the participants give, which they know will appear in the public arena. I am sure, in real life, they are cool people.
Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer
