Am I alone in hating bank holidays? Just because I’ve got a day off doesn’t mean I suddenly have 20 percent less work to do. And don’t get me started on the government’s plans to move one of the holidays, but not to move the Thursday ‘holy farting’ one. Bottom line: legislators have summerhouses and they don’t want to give up a four-day weekend. Anyhow, who’s going to pick them up when they do 40 percent less work that week? Certainly not anyone who doesn’t have the vote.
I had another reason to hate bank holidays last week. Somehow I managed to delete the correct date from the Carnival piece, which made it look like it was taking place last Saturday not this – apologies if you turned up in the city centre hoping to see naked flesh and all you got were festival-goers pissing in the street.
Talking of which, last weekend’s issue was a bit of a disaster all round. My editorial encouraged you to take the Vesterbo Festival over the rival Tivoli one: a bad call in retrospect. A colleague, who has been going to Vesterbo’s since it started, said it was terrible, while another, who went to Tivoli’s, said it was surprisingly good.
Suffice it to say, we should have seen the warning lights in the planning. The Vesterbo edition had less stages than normal and, whereas it used to present all the stages in one enclosure, this time there were remote venues – sounds more like a handful of random concerts than a festival. It will surprise few to learn it’s lost its public funding and is probably on its last legs.
It’s sad, firstly for the upcoming bands it supports, but also because at 50kr a night, it was a cheap event, and increasingly you have to pay through the nose in Copenhagen. Not that this coming weekend is a bad one. The Medieval Market, Ledreborgs Livsstilsdage and the International Sand Sculpture Festival are all reasonably priced, while the Gumball 3000 Rally, like many of the Carnival events, is completely free.
Unlike the ‘it will cost me later’ bank holiday Monday – if I told you to enjoy it, would you really believe me?
