20 hours ago
I went to Glastonbury. The single worst thing? The other people
Another Glastonbury music festival draws to a close — this time it's over for two years; 2026 will literally be a fallow year for its venue, Worthy Farm — and I find myself feeling all the emotions I traditionally feel in its Release. A deep and abiding gratitude. Bliss, feelings are not provoked by the music, I should say. Nor are they a consequence of my being moved by the joyous gathering of so many for one, singular purpose. The union of it. The transcendent revelry!No. I am feeling elated, released, grateful and blissful because I didn't go. Again! Glastonbury happened, some 210,000 people got tickets … and absolutely none of them — not a single one of them — was year's Glastonbury marks close to the 30th time I didn't go, on the trot. Something of a record, you might say; certainly a personal best. Though one I intend on smashing in 2027, when I also won't go to that you say? I don't know what I'm missing?Oh, but you see: I do!I went to Glastonbury in the early Nineties, when I was 18. It was the end of my first year at university. I was young and up for things and broke yet resourceful and, you know what? If you hate Glastonbury under those circumstances, you are never going to like Glastonbury.
And I hated Glastonbury.
I went because all my cool new uni friends said I'd love it, even though I was fairly sure I wouldn't. This, incidentally, was the last time I ever did anything in my entire life because other people insisted I'd love it while I knew I wouldn't. It was also the last time I camped.
• How I got Rod Stewart, 80, fit to perform
It was a rain-sodden year. The mud clung to us like miserable tar. Within hours of arriving — having realised I hated this but couldn't leave because: how? There were people everywhere, panic-inducing quantities of people, all blocking the exits! — I was both ankle deep in mud and coated in it. It didn't feel like it would ever come off. And it smelt. God, how it smelt! Three days of Glastonbury unfurled for me like one of those slow-mo cinematic portrayals of war: chaos and pity and fallen soldiers everywhere you looked.
I set my young mind on survival — nothing more. I may have been mildly, briefly diverted by Hothouse Flowers (or was it James?). I missed the Happy Mondays because there'd been a snafu with my allocated tent and I'd had to find someone else with whom to share canvas. Which didn't actually matter because … I'd also just realised I don't like live music. Not really. Taylor Swift at Wembley? Sure! Ageing indie band doing album tracks on the Acoustic Stage at Glasto? Absolutely not. In summary, and though I have never been in a k-hole — the hellish, transient, dissociated state caused by high doses of the illegal drug ketamine — I'm reasonably sure it would be exactly how Glastonbury felt to me.
If I had to put my finger on the single worst thing about it, I'd say: it's the other people. They're awful. Being surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people who actively, repeatedly seek out all those things from which I recoiled in horror? Who like to be briefly filthy and eat wildly overpriced salmonella-ish street food, who've spent ages making banners displaying paper-thin political sentiments they'll wave about in vast, edgy crowds which — let's face it — could turn, one way or another, in the time it takes a relatively unknown punk act to chant 'Death to the IDF!'
And — I say this as a ridiculously white, middle-class person myself — is there no limit to how white and middle class they are? Are they not embarrassed by it? I mean, a few white middle-class people in a field — you could probably get away with. But hundreds and thousands of them? All at once? All chanting this year's anti-establishment slogans, dressed in Barbour jackets (fashionable again, hadn't you heard?), broderie anglaise shorts and gaucho boots (this year's biker boots, which were last year's cowboy boots); quietly congratulating themselves on finally booking the yurt (sleeps two, costs £3,375, price of entry not included)? Spending time in between sets hooked up to replenishing vitamin IVs and bitching at the celebrities who helicoptered in — don't they know how ecologically unsound that is? — never mind that they themselves Chelsea tractored it all the way?
Or that a helicopter is the only way you'd ever, ever get me back there?
• The 10 best Glastonbury legends slot performances — ranked
The Duchess of Sussex is to launch her own rosé wine tomorrow, a Napa Valley grape with a 2023 vintage. The wine, produced under her As Ever umbrella of merch, will 'be infused with joy and whimsy'. Which most wine is, in my experience — up until, like, the fifth or sixth glass, when it becomes rather more infused with your desire to tell someone else the slightly ugly truth about themselves, or just have a bit of a sing. Or a cry. Or both? (Someone should write that into a marketing pitch.)
The price of Meghan's wine has yet to be declared, but the estate that produces it — Fairwinds (maker, also, of bespoke wines for Barry Manilow) — typically charges £26 a bottle for its rosé. This'll put Meghan's at the classier end of the celebrity rosé spectrum. The Brad Pitt and Angelina end — their Miraval wine goes for about £20 a bottle. Kylie Minogue charges about £8.99 for hers; Gary Barlow, a modest £8. The King's sparkling English rosé, flogged under the Highgrove label, is currently on at £34.95, but then it is fizz. Although last week he was doing a deal where you could get 15 per cent off if you bought six bottles or more — thus causing some delicious speculation this might be a tactical commercial anticipating of Meghan's launch, ie shots fired in a forthcoming inter-royal war of the rosés.
