Some words about Glastonbury

Although I haven't been for the last 5 years or so, the festival was a big part of my life and that of my friends during my early 20s, and in a lot of ways it still feels a bit like a second home, albeit one which only exists for a week or so every year, in some kind of strange limbo outside the real world. I've got incredibly vivid memories of each Glastonbury that I've been to - from the Somme-like mud and drum & bass of 1997 (my first Glasto - I was hooked) to the sunshine, endless techno sound systems and fence jumping of 1999-2000; Radiohead's performance of OK Computer in ‘97, to be reprised with new additions in 2003 (a vintage year for music which also featured REM & The Flaming Lips) and watching the sun come up from the Stone Circle, to an inevitable backdrop of incessant drumming. A whole lot of memories, a whole lot of music, a whole lot of friends & relationships, a whole lot of Festival.  The place is just incredible and no matter how many times you go back, it still manages to blow your mind in some way you didn't expect.
Enough nostalgia - back to last week. It didn't take long to get to the realisation that it will take you an hour (minimum) to get anywhere, but that the journey will be incredibly good fun, probably livened up by meeting some characters along the way or running into friends, and it also didn't take long to work out that the backstage "VIP" compound is probably the second most boring place to hang out in the festival. That's not to say I haven't seen amazing music on the main stages over the years, but I'm not one of the people who deliberately camp as close to the Pyramid as possible in order not to miss a note of the headline acts - fact is, I'm into a different kind of Glasto these days ...
Walk up past the Pyramid Stage, beyond the seemingly endless stalls which will sell you all manner of Festival Tat ™, then past the bafflingly renamed West Holts stage (formerly the Jazz/World Stage)  and you get to something that feels a bit more like the original spirit of the festival. The Green Fields contains all manner of incredible food stalls, small music stages, craft workshops, sound systems that play music 24 hours and healers who will sort out your festival ailments. And the whole lot is entirely powered by solar and wind power - no generators, no cables. Yes, there are quite a few hippies, but if you can get over that then it's probably the nicest place to be on the site.
Walk a bit further than that and you reach a set of paths which feel like the very end of the festival site. This year it split into three areas, named Shangri La, Arcadia and Block 9. Shangri La felt like the dodgier streets of Amsterdam or (I'm told) Bangkok - lots of winding small pathways past bizarre shops and tiny rooms with loads of people dancing. And a man selling incredibly strong cider. Block 9 looked like a scene from a Phillip K Dick novel, or the Mad Max films - a tower block on one side had 4 floors of music going on (Jungle in the basement, Charleston on level 3), and the back end of a smoking tube train sticking out of the roof. Beside it was a ruined shop front with a live burlesque show going on behind a broken wall. Then around the corner from that was Arcadia - an after-hours performance featuring jets of fire spitting from a huge spider-like construction made of old industrial machines, followed by actual lightning being conducted through two guys on top of podiums. A properly incredible sight and I'm still not sure how it's possible to do it without killing someone.
All around these places there were music and performances hiding in the strangest of spaces and people having the time of their lives to some of the most far out entertainment going. Some of the most creative things I've seen in quite a while were going on at this year's Glastonbury, generally tucked away in a quiet corner, and I'm going back for more next year.