Never Ration Ice

Hospitality lives and dies by context. Nobody expects foie gras at a motorway service station, or a vintage Barolo at a sticky-floored rock club in Wolverhampton. You can forgive the paper plates at a barbecue joint if the ribs are sublime. You can forgive the pint in a cloudy glass at a dive bar if the jukebox hits right and the bartender knows your name.

But context should never be a blank cheque for contempt. Context doesn’t mean lowering standards until they scrape along the floor. Context doesn’t mean treating people like cattle because they don’t have another option.

And yet, this weekend at Victorious Festival in Portsmouth, I stood in line, handed over nine pounds twenty-five for a can of pink Gordon’s gin cocktail, and watched a bar team act like petty dictators with a monopoly on hydration.

Let me be clear: I knew what I was paying for. Festivals are gouge-zones. Everyone knows that. A £10 beer isn’t about hops or craft or quality. It’s about scarcity and captive markets. It’s the toll you pay to keep the music rolling, the lights blazing, the portaloos emptied. We accept it because it’s part of the game.

What you don’t accept — what you should never accept — is contempt disguised as policy.

The Communion of a Single Cube

The can arrived in a flimsy plastic cup, half-warm. I asked for some ice. The bartender, with all the generosity of a Victorian orphan master, tonged out a single cube and dropped it into the cup like he was giving me communion. One cube. As though that would chill nine quid’s worth of supermarket cocktail.

I asked for another. He stiffened, looked at me like I’d asked for the crown jewels, then waved over his supervisor.

The supervisor — festival-bar khaki, radio clipped to his belt, the whole “I’m important here” posture — marched over, chin high. He leaned in and delivered the verdict like a judge passing sentence: we’re rationing ice.

That was it. Rationing ice.

As if the ice was being airlifted in by helicopter from some endangered glacier. As if giving me three cubes instead of one might collapse the fragile ecosystem of the festival economy.

It was day three. Stocks were dwindling. Fair enough. But here’s the golden rule: you serve until it’s gone. You do the best you can with what’s left, and when it finally runs out, you hold up your hands and say sorry, we’re out. You don’t sit on a tub of ice like Smaug on a hoard of gold coins, doling it out like wartime rations.

Because here’s the kicker: it’s not about the ice. It’s about the gesture. Hospitality is about generosity, not scarcity. Even if you only have crumbs left, you share them with grace.

The Rudeness Tax

The supervisor could have said: “Sorry mate, it’s our last bucket, we’re trying to make it stretch. Tell you what, I’ll give you a few more this time.” That would have been enough. A tiny act of kindness, and the problem vanishes.

Instead, he doubled down with rudeness. My way or fuck off.

And when a gust of wind or an accidental knock blew my sad one-cube drink onto the ground, he accused me of staging it. As though I’d orchestrated a pratfall, sacrificing the only ice I had, just to hustle a few more cubes from his rationed stash.

That’s not policy. That’s contempt.

And contempt, in hospitality, is poison. It doesn’t just ruin one drink. It seeps into the atmosphere, the memory, the story people tell later. It becomes the headline: not the band, not the sunshine, not the vibe — but the bar that treated you like a nuisance while picking your pocket.

Festival Bars: The Toll Booth Model

Let’s be honest: festival bars aren’t bars. They’re toll booths. The product isn’t gin or beer or cider. The product is access. Access to something wet, vaguely alcoholic, inside the gates.

That’s why they can get away with charging a tenner for a can that would set you back £2.50 in Tesco. It’s not about the liquid, it’s about the monopoly. They’ve got the license, the exclusive rights, the lock-in. You either pay, or you go thirsty.

But here’s the problem with toll booths: they don’t create memories worth keeping. Nobody looks back and says, remember that incredible can of Gordon’s at Victorious? They say, remember how we got rinsed for nine quid a can and still couldn’t get a proper drink?

Hospitality should never feel like extortion. Even at a festival. Especially at a festival. Because festivals are supposed to be about release, escape, joy. They’re a suspension of the normal world. If the bar feels like a shakedown, it breaks the illusion.

Ice as a Cultural Currency

Let’s talk about ice for a second. Because it’s not just frozen water. In Western drinking culture, ice is ritual. It’s hospitality in its most elemental form.

In America, you can’t get a glass of water without a fistful of ice cubes rattling in it. In Asia, ice is often the line between street-side refreshment and food-poison roulette. In Britain, we’ve always been suspicious of it — the old joke about getting “one cube if you’re lucky” in a pub G&T — but in the modern bar world, ice is status. It’s quality. It’s the difference between a flat, warm gin and a crisp, cold cocktail.

So when a bar rations ice, they’re not just rationing cubes. They’re rationing generosity. They’re telling you: you’re not worth cooling down properly. You’re not worth the gesture.

And the irony? Ice is the cheapest thing behind the bar. Water, frozen. The markup on that £9.25 can wasn’t being threatened by giving me three cubes instead of one. The whole thing was theatre — and the theatre was contempt.

The Slippery Slope

Here’s why this matters. Because the excuse — it’s a festival, they’ll drink whatever we give them — doesn’t stay at the festival. That attitude creeps. It bleeds. Like ink in water.

The bartender who learns that rudeness is policy at a festival bar takes that attitude to his next job in a high-street pub. The supervisor who treats guests like irritants carries that into his next management gig at a chain restaurant. The culture metastasizes.

And soon you’ve got a whole country of bars and pubs where service is grudging, where smiles are rationed, where apologies are too much effort. A whole industry that shrugs and says: what do you expect?

That’s the death spiral. That’s how standards slip. Not in one dramatic collapse, but in a thousand small shrugs. A thousand rationed cubes of ice.

Hospitality as Generosity

Hospitality is not hard. It’s not complicated. It’s about the small acts of generosity that make people feel welcome.

The smile when you order. The honesty when something’s gone wrong. The gesture of giving a little extra, even when you don’t have to. Those things cost almost nothing. But they’re everything. They’re the difference between a transaction and a memory.

At a festival, when you’re already rinsing people for cans at a tenner, the least you can do is give them enough ice to make it palatable. The least you can do is apologise when you’re out of stock. The least you can do is treat them like guests, not hostages.

Because if hospitality means anything, it means generosity. Without that, you’re just a toll booth with a drinks license.

The Lesson of the Ice Bucket

So here’s the takeaway from Victorious Festival 2025: never ration ice. Not literally, not metaphorically. Don’t ration generosity. Don’t ration decency. Don’t ration the small gestures that make people feel seen.

Hospitality has context, yes. But context is not an excuse. Context can bend standards, but it should never break them.

If you’re charging nearly a tenner for a can, you don’t have the right to ration ice. You don’t have the right to sneer. You don’t have the right to treat the guest like an inconvenience.

Because once you do, you’ve stopped being in hospitality. You’ve become a toll booth. And nobody ever left a toll booth with a story worth telling.