The Glastonbury Festival 5k Jog: highlighting new-age nationalism
I remember when I first heard about the Glastonbury Festival 5k jog, and I felt the same sense of damnation as someone who refused the banker’s offer of £70,000 on Deal or No Deal and ended up going home with a quid. I felt wronged by it. The whole thing seemed like a sly aside against all of us lazy sinners just trying to get by. Millions of us felt the same as a barrage of hate made its way onto various forums in a tsunami of condemnation against these healthy bastards in their spandex.
We are a nation of principles, and drinking to such an excessive extent that jogging is actually dangerous is one of them. Breaking this tradition with cardiovascular vulgarity seemed like a crime against the central tenets that once upheld this broken, shithole nation…
And then, I partook in the jogging tradition. Peer pressured by the need to offer up a gonzo feature for publication, I slipped out of my tent and went for a quick ten-minute dash around the Other Stage, boggling the mind of the odd scattered raver regrouping their minds and jaws from the night before in some corner of a foreign field.
Nothing else happened. There was the usual upswell of catharsis that always comes from a jog, and that’s all I have to report on a personal matter barring a touch of Athlete’s Foot. This damp squib did, however, highlight the peculiarity of the condemnation in the first place. I wondered as I waited in a 30-minute queue for the hospitality showers, ‘Why are we so revulsed by this as a nation? Why do these strange festival fitness freaks induce such rage?’
In truth, the whole thing seems indicative of a new sort of nationalism—a nationalism that doesn’t take pride in the country or hail the flag but nationalism no less. We have, in essence, become postmodern with our new traditions. Being drunken bums is something we celebrate in a tribalist way, and jogging at a festival goes against this fundamentally.
In the process, it is lost on us that it is frankly one of the maddest things to ever get angry about. At Lollapalooza in Brazil, they wouldn’t bat an eyelash at the joggers. However, in old Blighty, we imbue the simple act of jogging with the notion that it is a sinister public face of class disparities, as though the act of moving your legs at pace is a middle-class thing. There is no doubt that Middleclastonbury showcases this damning class gulf in a lot of other ways, but jogging doesn’t really seem to be a signifier in principle.
George Orwell once wrote, “Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also – since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself – unshakeably certain of being in the right”. We live in a weird country when that can strangely be applied to people jogging in a field, smugly rubbing our faces in their sweaty individualism, a bastarding blight on our collective carnal debauchery.
