When you’re not AT Glastonbury but feel as though you should be a curious conflict can develop in your mind as well as in the media. Radio 1, NME and other portals capitalise on the festival’s perpetual popularity excessively as if to justify their own existence further, their tone generally and irritatingly obsessive yet vacuous and trite and as giddy as the 16 year olds who messed up their GCSEasies and now head for The Rolling Fields Of Avalon (TM) to get inebriated on booze-injected pear-ade and possibly lose their virginity in a hedge by the toilets while The Zutons arse about on The Other Stage. This in mild contrast to what always seems a deeply cynical, schaudenfreude-tastic yet desperate effort by the Grown-Up News to report on the event, with just a hint of wry glee if a few spots of rain dog proceedings and send tents ‘floating’ and welly sales soaring.
Part of me remains that sanguine 16 year old about the whole thing, the other a jaded tosspot apparently pleased that other people are not necessarily having more fun than I am after all (surely this is not allowed). A conflict that seemingly can never be resolved.
But Glastonbury’s capricious meteorological issues aside, you cannot fail to have fun there. The only question is how much and whether it will match the probably unrealistic expectations in your head. So as I now imagine how nice it must be to hear ‘Teenage Kicks’ belted out defiantly and honourably by a withering Fergal and gang from the rain-lashed Pyramid stage, the Tor a distant, faded friend heralding you from afar, reminding you of the site’s unrelenting charm. You bastards, I wish I was there, again…