Jezza’s playing Glasto: is this a good idea?

I do like a wet and muddy Glastonbury. Albeit, admittedly, not quite as much as I like a dry and sunny one. It’s different, though. When the weather is poor, you become a pioneer, remaking the land, terra-forming the turf with your trudge. On the Sunday evening you can climb high up to the top of the park, the south-west slopes, past the tipis, along from the stone circle, and you will see all that was once green turned to brown. ‘We did that,’ you may think.

Glastonbury is a secular pilgrimage, but it is the filth that makes it holy. Don’t laugh at me. It does. Mud, you learn, is not a substance but a process, taking you from wet ground to a slithering, splattering slide to a sucking, squelching treacle that fights for your boots. And that’s just the degeneration. The rebirth works in reverse, from a thick, cloying fudge, through my favourite stage, a rubbery, topsoil plasticine.