Mud, Madness and how to carry on regardless
For Glastonbury virgin Tom Peck no amount of slime is going to spoil the festival fun because he's British and he's on holiday
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Your support makes all the difference."Once it rains, that's it. It's over. If it rains on Sunday, fine. If it rains on the first day, you might as well go home." The words of my co-camper, a Glastonbury veteran, echo in my ears as I, a Glastonbury virgin, drive on to the Somerset farm in the middle of a monsoon on Wednesday morning.
Carrying a backpack containing 120 cans of lager two miles across a field of unforgiving sludge, my thoughts switch between the works of Siegfried Sassoon and Andy McNab.
Two minutes out of the car park the "trundler", a flimsy trolley which has a further five crates tethered to it with a bungee cord, suffers a catastrophic system failure. Cans of Strongbow are dotted around, sunk into the earth like landmines.
Already, the approaches to the Pyramid stage are a swamp and not a note has been played. A simple journey from A (tent, toilet, bar) to B (bar, toilet, tent) is accompanied by a cacophony of little squelches.
The central walkways are covered, and there the mud is mercifully thin. But a casual meander off them to the nearest food tent is nothing short of a leap of faith. The dance village, near where we are camping, is a great wide carpet of slime. When the beats start dropping later, the task will challenge even the most inventive of shape-throwers. How do you dance when your feet are stuck to the floor?
But Glastonbury is categorically not a war zone. Everyone's in far too good a mood for a start. In the campsite, playing "Baggy Trousers" by Madness on portable speakers and can-canning through the sludge has become a contagious motif. After you've factored in tickets, petrol, provisions, equipment and so on, Glastonbury is not cheap, and it lasts nearly a week. For many here, myself included, this is their main holiday of the year and people are determined to have a good time.
Just as the "slut-walkers" have had left-wing intellectuals noting the need of every generation to invent its own form of feminism, so every generation of Briton, it seems, needs to invent their own way to pretend to enjoy themselves on holiday.
The sun has shone for long hours, and better weather is forecast. Too late, I am told, to do anything about the mud, but in plenty of time to gently cook the beers, melt the chocolate biscuits, and turn the breakfast bacon green. But who cares? I'm on holiday. I'm having fun. And it hasn't even started yet.
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