Event of the Decade

Guardian Readers' Events

What's your (cultural) event of the decade?

I think mine was watching Alabama 3 perform an acoustic set in Aberdeen. I've never seen a band play with such commitment. It was a complete surprise, as they're normally pretty shambolic.

The flurry-of-dandruff furore which surrounded the "Global Economic Downturn". The rest of the planet finally catches up with Stoke, which has been in de facto recession for the last three decades.

My cultural event of the decade that used the phrase 'de facto' occured at Rock Ness music festival as I stood outside my tent one morning and observed several people urinating against the perimeter fence. 'It's a de facto urinal' I thought and, suddenly overcome, I fell to the floor. I lay there for several hours as people tramped past, whistling Johnny Cash's Ring Of Fire and calling one another Audrey.

I've never been accused of messing about at this festival nonsense.

Colin's anecdote above is now my 'cultural event of the decade'. It's the perfect short story. The excesses alluded to in the narrative are counterbalanced by wonderfully economical prose, while the piece also conflates the taut resonance of a Raymond Carver and a mixture of sadness and grotesquerie one finds in Flannery O'Connor. There is wistful humour there, but also a lingering melancholy: the tale is both cautionary and celebratory; an individual's fleeting experience serves as a metonym for the culture more broadly. Through Colin's subjective prism we find our own collective experience.

Bravo!

A Pseud.

This mutual wankery must stop.

In a bit.

Biginoil wrote: My cultural event of the decade that used the phrase 'de facto' occured at Rock Ness music festival as I stood outside my tent one morning and observed several people urinating against the perimeter fence. 'It's a de facto urinal' I thought and, suddenly overcome, I fell to the floor. I lay there for several hours as people tramped past, whistling Johnny Cash's Ring Of Fire and calling one another Audrey.

I've never been accused of messing about at this festival nonsense.

I'm amazed you've missed off the fact that somebody left a present outside of the tent...

It was me

Someone took a shit outside your tent??! You should have included that in the story - I could have said something about "...shades of Will Self's lacerating absurdism".

Naturally.

It was excluded in the interests of brevity from my original tale.

Andrew did it. He poked his bum out of the tent in the middle of the night and curled one out. To my eternal regret, I did not make a video recording of this from outside the tent. What fun we could have playing it backwards and watching his big white arse poking through the zipper like a hairy breech birth, drawing a log from the soil then reverting to its nylon womb.

Samuel Beckett wrote that we are all born astride the grave. Andrew's arse shone brightly for that moment and then all was dark once more.

KIMBO

Why has he only got hair on one side of his chest?

Here's mine..

Erm not cultural I know,but event all the same!

Monty,did you steal one of Eva's bibs?!