Eternal pork and In the Name of Mud
7/7/2004

I have to digress from East Timor briefly because at the moment my preoccupation is mud.

I am in Denmark, you see, and having just recovered from the Roskilde Festival I want to get this down while it is still fresh and sloppy.

To begin, I have to emphasise that spending a month in a developing country could in no way have prepared me for the living conditions at a 100,000 strong Scandinavian music festival.

It is no coincidence, I believe, that the festival grounds usually house cattle, because as we were herded from pen to pen, into group showers and toilets, or to the food stalls around the festival site, in many ways we resembled the lumbering beasts.

We were tagged, manhandled (well, searched) and kept outside for the most part, left to huddle, in groups, against the elements. And, this was supposed to be the Danish summer!

I really couldn’t content myself with the brief moments of sunlight inbetween squalls and torrential downpours. I was expecting some rain, sure, but I was also hoping there would be long periods of glorious sunlight where the mud would cake and fall from our skin, clothes and tents like dust and we could worship the sun god with Tuborg, the religous chant of “skal” and hands raised to the heavens.

Alas, it was not to be. Instead we drank to deaden the pain, mute out the rain and blur the mud till it was more of a chocolate swirl - OK, we had to drink A LOT.

The music and crowd were diverse, with everything resembling music from the sweet pop sounds of Danish singer Swan Lee to the Concord-like rumblings of the metal masters Morbid Angel (the name is so “metal” that I thought it was a joke).

The Danes come from Viking stock and it seemed natural that they should drink hard, party heavily and like their music hard and heavy too. Apparently the Viking version of heaven is something like Roskilde (with less mud) and features a pig from which you can just slice off a fresh piece of meat whenever you are hungry and it will regenerate: Eternal Pork. That has to be the name of a Danish metal outfit. It just has to be.

But back to the mud. I have never seen so much mud in all my life. Really. If you were to collect all the mud I have gazed upon in my 27 years and dump it into one place, you might just fill the East Camp at Roskilde. Just.

And this brings me to something that has been troubling me since the festival. If the Eskimos can have more than 30 names for snow, how is it that the Danes are satisfied with only three words for mud. (My Danish-English dictionary lists them as mudder, dynd and slam but I don’t know what the distinctions between them might be).

So I thought that in the spirit of multiculturalism, I would give them a bit of a flying start with the following names and definitions. I have deliberately chosen words that I believe would work well in both the Danish and English languages (apologies if any of them already exist for something else - I didn’t check):

slog - for mud the consistency of porridge, that plucks at your boots and sticks you fast as you try to take a step - often with the result of overbalancing the slogger.

sloop - for the thick, soupy mud that sloshes around your ankles and readily flicks itself at nearby targets (including the slooper’s upper body) at every step.

gluggle - for the wet brown substance that behaves almost like water, but is of the colour and consistency that makes it impossible to judge how deep the puddle of gluggle might be.

gludge - this mud is easy to recognise by its smell. It has a high component of cow dung and reminds one of the smell at a dairy.

crugoo - mud that has a thin upper crust, but underneath it oozes like slimy lavae.

crug - hard dry mud that forms solid waves in the ground, making it difficult to get an even footing.

scutter - The once liquid mud splatters that have since dried, leaving small, hard spots on clothing and skin.

oogle - for mud with no water content but made purely from dirt and human piss.

uugrr - specifically for mud trodden in with human faeces.

Note: the above two mud types are also known, in English, as “festival mud” and “Roskilde mud”. They are not known to occur in any great quantities in other environments.