Expect a tumble of fractional posts over the next few days covering all the stuff we saw and did at Glastonbury. For now, it’s enough to say that we survived, only one of our tents didn’t make it through the thunderstorm, and once we’d all got kitted out and adjusted our expectations we all had a terrific time (at least I think we all did) (anyway I did). In contrast to last year when the festival just got a bit more miserable and dreary as things muddied up, the floods this year were genuinely spectacular and quite exciting – at the same time as you dearly wanted them to stop there was a sense of morbid fascination about quite how awful things were going to get.
They also happened at a pretty good time – on the Thursday night they’d have ruined the big social evening, later in the weekend they’d have made the festival end on a sticky low not a sweaty high. But the floods right before things got started properly, meaning everybody had plenty of time to plan (and the stalls time to get more wellies in). They meant that we plotted our days much more carefully – there was a lot less wandering about, a lot more consideration of what people wanted to do and a lot more sticking together – I’ll remember it for the friendliness (general and within our group) as much as for the deluge.