Dream Weekend at Hogsozzle 2017!!

(This post was written in 2017, even though we are now looking forward to 2018, it should make interesting reading if you are playing to hit up the Hog and I now have a special referral link for ticket buying - please do consider using it if you want to purchase a ticket - click here)

Hiii!! If you haven’t snapped up a ticket to my favourite indie festival yet, I’m going to attempt to convince you to in this post, by telling you exactly what I plan to be doing over the weekend…I can’t tell you how excitedly I am counting down the days until we pitch our tents for the first time this year, unpack our ever-growing festival supplies and start our weekend of ridiculousness with the rest of the Hogsozzlers (check their site by clicking here)…here’s my plan for the weekend;

Friday Evening...

We’ll arrive, almost at the same time, sort out passes and tickets and carry our stuff over to the best spot in the campsite – last year we managed to snag such a good place by showing up early,  even though we needed enough room for 10 tents we managed to keep a special corner all to ourselves and I want to pitch there again this year! I’ve been busy briefing everyone who says they are going to get there first exactly where this prime spot is…

We’ll pitch our tents and unroll our sleeping bags (but we definitely won’t unpack or sort out our stuff!) and then we’ll gather up our drinks tokens and head straight to the beautiful wooden bar on the top of the hill to grab some gin & juice and find out who is playing when. The line-up is filled with better-than-you’d expect music and acts for the price and there are a couple I really cannot wait to see, including Electric Swing Circus, Mirrored Theory, Little Brother Eli and obviously, The Turner Brothers.

Late Friday Night…

I’ll be rolling around on the hill, surrounded by LED costumes (although we’ll be saving the big guns for the Saturday!) drinks and fun art installations, I think the bath full of ballpit balls was super last year and the rocket ship boat has to be making another appearance given the theme, right?

Very, Very late Friday Night…

We’ll make our way back to camp and dig out our camping-friendly supplies, plastic bottles and disposable cups and make friends with our neighbours. This is essential as if we do manage to land the camping spot of dreams, we are pretty far from the main walkway so we won’t get the usual through traffic, we’ll need to ally with our neighbours for when supplies are running low later in the weekend – crashing other people’s tents and finding out what festival hacks they remembered to bring with them is always fun. This year I’m all about the bulldog clips for hanging things up in your tent, I really don’t want to ruin another camera/phone/charging device, last year cost me a fortune in replacement devices and I still haven’t got a decent camera for this year’s adventures.

Early Saturday Morning,

Our make-up will be running, the tents will be full of glitter and mud and chances are, we will have misplaced either a band member, an instrument or something else of value. We’ll climb onto the pile of bags in our tents (because we obviously didn’t bother sorting anything out in the daylight) and drift into a troubled sleep, half an ear waiting for the announcement that the food places are opening up…

Saturday Morning,

We’ll start the day munching on whatever breakfast foods we can get our hands on, hopefully sitting inside a big old rusty helicopter, because, where else could I possibly want to eat my breakfast? The first year we went to Hogsozzle the breakfast offering was…disappointing, to say the least. Last year they scored an absolute double whammy with the Cauldron and The Wingmen – I haven’t worked out if they are coming again this year – I believe they have now set up a bricks and mortar store in Sleaford but I can’t find them online – what’s happened to those guys? 

Saturday Daytime

We’ll pop to the nearby Tesco and pick up supplies, including lots of water because I can totally make it 27 degrees in my dream weekend right? We’ll eat ice cream and if there’s any surviving remains of our carefully packed picnic, we’ll probably eat that too, rolling around in the sun and slowly getting our costume bits together for the big costume night.  We’ll head over to the Hog Roast as many times as we think we can get away with and I’ll try to avoid looking in it’s big burnt eye as I chow down on the best pig of the year…

I seriously cannot wait to see the costumes this year, did you see that these guys won the costume competition last year? I mean really, who else could it have possibly been? So weird.

 People really go all out for this one and I’ve spent the last few weeks in a dedicated Facebook chat group with the fellow Turner Brother friends and girlfriends trying to come up with ideas for our costumes along the Best Theme Ever – COSMIC DISCO!! I’m pulling together loads of DIY ideas to share soon so we’ll be spending Saturday afternoon glittering up, slipping into our homemade costumes and basically coating every part of our bodies in as much cosmic silver body paint as possible as well as eyeing up the competition from our fellow campers…

Saturday Evening,

One by one, we will emerge from  our cramped tents like cosmic butterflies, all light-up bras, sparkly crop tops and giant moonboots (I hope!)

 We’ll dance the night away under a perfectly clear sky, knocking back jagerbombs, rushing from the main area to the hot, sweaty dance enclosure to the Pig Pen to the brand new Yurt, taking in as many costumes, acts and experiences as possible – I definitely plan to reach peak excitement and festival fun tonight!

Late Saturday Night…

I’ll lose all my friends and become completely disorientated, eventually finding my way back to our campsite (which is basically home by this point, even though I’m still sleeping on top of a pile of bags and other peoples groundsheets and all the water has run out and there’s someone’s mud-filled shoe in place of my pillow…) The other girls are telling me they will be having a sane one tonight but I’ll still be going until sunrise.

Sunday Morning…

Sunday is the day I’m looking forward to most! There’s a huge paint fight to get involved in (I’ll be hunting down a cheap white unitard on Amazon for this!) and it’s the day of The Turner Brothers performance on the main stage – the boys have been regulars at Hogsozzle for the last few years and I can’t wait to see them back on stage after a break over the winter, it’s been months since I heard them live and I know for a fact they have some fab new material – I’ll be taking over their Instagram and hopefully live streaming the whole thing, if I haven’t damaged all my charging devices by this point!

Sunday Night…

We’ll dance long into the night but since I’ll have finally unrolled my sleeping bag properly by this point I’ll almost certainly be in need of more than 40 winks so I’m picturing dozing, half out of my tent, partly listening what the true hardcore festival revellers get up to on their last night…

Sunday morning…

We’ll realise we’ve spent all our money and lost all our stuff but I’m definitely going to use this morning to cajole everyone into our second annual group photo for the records, as well as packing up all our stuff and beginning the countdown to the next festival on our schedule this summer, The Curious Yellow…

Phewwww, I kind of feel like I’ve relived the last two years there and it’s definitely got me so pumped for this year – if this sounds like a great weekend to you, pop over to the Hogsozzle website and grab one of the last few tickets before it’s too late – don’t forget to say hi, we’ll be the ones with the best camping spot and the flashing LED bras :)

Buy tickets here: Hogsozzle 2017

I’m working on a blog post about using biodegradable glitter this year, so you have any ideas for brands and shops that sell glitter that won’t harm birds or the environment, please do drop me a comment below!