Perv-O-Shine and sleep vaping: 23 things I learned about the world – and myself – at Glastonbury 2023
1. There is a huge unmet need for adult fancy dress occasions
Sure, sure, it’s hot, and you’re not going to shower, and this will force some choices at Glastonbury that you wouldn’t make in regular life: shorter shorts, for instance, or a hat. This doesn’t even come close to explaining the wild precision, the carefully coordinated flamboyance of festival outfits. Imagine every fabric that you rarely see on public transport – fur, feathers, sequins, crinkly leatherette, chiffon, lace, spandex, mesh, dust – dye it all pink, stick 17 blokes in the same look and glitter all their faces, and you are somewhere near an average posse. They’ll have some personal discretion, of course, in the matter of whether to have a parasol or a hat made of umbrella. Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like anyone who needs dressing-up days at all needs them more often than once a year.
2. There’s always one
There was a sticker poll in the hippy woo-woo field, asking a simple if leading question: what would you spend £205bn on? Education, the NHS, protecting the planet, or nuclear weapons? People engaged with it surprisingly seriously, I thought: I heard two people have an actual debate about the relative importance of health and education. But there in the “nuclear weapons” column, four brave contrarians had Post-it-noted their support. Because there’s always one (or four).
3. Goodbye snakebite, hello lagerita
Maybe you’ve been round the traps a few years and think there’s nothing further to add to a pint of lager. You’ve tried it with blackcurrant, lime, lemonade and even cider; maybe you pushed the boat out once and added champagne to a pint of Guinness. But until you’ve tried a San Miguel with a full frozen margarita in it, you’re nowhere near bottoming out this drink’s potential. It’s not that it tastes nice – it doesn’t: the margarita is assertively sweet, and you can’t really taste the beer. It’s more the swirling temperature variegation, like when you get in the sea, and there’s a warm bit, then a cold bit, then another warm bit, and you’re struck by the magical unpredictability of the universe. It’s like drinking that. Great, in other words. Just great.
4. Streaking is back
There was a charming moment when a naked guy rushed the stage during Max Richter’s mid-morning performance on Saturday. It was heady and nostalgic: we haven’t seen enough spontaneous nudity for ages, not since the 90s mud years.
5. Those guys who give each other shoulder carries: do they ever hurt themselves?
Jack and Dan, both 24, are just about exactly the same size. Rather than lift each other, it’s better all round if Jack heaves up their smaller friend who wishes to remain anonymous. There is no negotiation ahead. “I just get him straight up in the air,” Jack says, with pride. If there’s a good song on, he has more staying power, and his maximum is five minutes. He’s never hurt himself in the moment,but one time he woke up the next morning and couldn’t move his neck. “It’s always me, because I’m the fat one,” he says. Nope, Dan contradicts, sometimes they enter a pact and take turns to lift each other. “I’ve ruined a lot of clothes,” he says. To sum up: I don’t want to be a killjoy, but I believe this to be quite dangerous.
6. There is no wisdom in crowds
“They must know where they’re going,” you think, when you see 10,000 people all walking in the same direction. They don’t. “I bet that’s delicious,” it’s fair to assume, when the queue for fish curry is so long it’ll take you from lunch to dinner. It isn’t. “I’m sure everyone will take a moment to think before they run into each other like they’re playing British bulldog,” you might suppose, when two tribes going in opposite directions meet on a narrow path. They won’t. Crowds do not represent the accumulated brain power of everyone in them. It’s more like taking one brain and dividing it by 10,000.
7. It’s a golden era for halloumi
Thank the genius who thought to shape it into chips and deep-fry it, or those who grill this mad uncheesy cheese with an idiosyncratic squeak and put in a salad wrap. One way or another, this is all anyone eats now and they look so happy doing so. Poor Cypriot sheep must be run ragged.
8. You don’t have to take your kids absolutely everywhere
There will always be one kid who’s flamboyant, ahead of the curve, loves music, gets off on drama, loves the spirit, and is over 10 years old. I found that kid; his name is Isaac. He belongs at a festival, he was living his best life there. Everyone else, seriously – there might be a Kidzfield, there might be a lot of other kids, you may even have struck up a real, possibly lasting friendship with another parent lugging around an early settler wagon full of arms and legs and noise-cancelling headphones and melted KitKats, you might think you’ve found a way to make this work … but did you ever consider the possibility that you’d all be less cranky if you’d left them at home?
9. Logically, Glastonbury will one day cover the entire country
For one weekend in June, Glastonbury is the fourth largest city in south-west England, home to 210,000 people, because the expansion was inexorable, the surrounding land just gobbled into its vortex. Only one neighbour resisted, and now he puts up a giant crucifix in his dwarfed homestead for the duration. He probably has a load of neighbours who said they were going to stand shoulder to shoulder, before they saw sense and sold up. I see no natural end to this.
10. Homemade elderflower cordial tastes completely different from shop-bought, but pakoras made with homegrown vegetables taste the same as regular pakoras
That is all. 11. Crochet: surprisingly versatile
I would have thought this pretty unsuitable for most clothes, and particularly unsuitable for bras. You’d have to be on permanent hole-alert. And yet it is this year’s material of choice for most clothes, and particularly bras. Noha, a record company executive, explains that it’s all in the dialectic: the wool bits are warm, and the holes are cooling, and I think what she was describing was a throughput of air, constantly regulating your skin temperature. Also: “It never stains – when you spill anything, the food just drops through the holes,” she says. None of this makes any sense, and yet everybody’s buying it. See also: There is no wisdom in crowds, above.
12. Wellies need TLC
For years, Hunters were the festival boot of choice, and the company went into administration just before Glastonbury, and everyone said, ‘Oh no, bummer, now we’ll all have to wear Crocs.’ That’s defeatist. If you’re not a farmer, you can keep the same pair of wellies your entire life. Though if you want them to look as good as new, you have to use the latex cleaner that goes by the name Perv-O-Shine.
13. Solar power works, you know
Sure, I’ve seen the leaps and bounds with solar technology, marvelled at the slice of sun in the energy mix, but I never really believed in it the way I believe in gravity, say. With my own eyes, I have now seen: a solar “power monkey” charge my phone; a solar panel power a lightbulb; a really enthusiastic man explaining nominal maximum output and open circuit voltage. Might as well just accept that it’s true – it’s pointless fighting it.
14. You need to score yourself a role that comes with a hi-vis jacket
Do you ever feel, in a makeshift city erected entirely for your pleasure, pinging from snack to drink to spectacle like a mindless pinball in an endlessly flashing machine, as if you don’t really exist? As if all the hedonism has taken you back to an amoebic state, where there are no thoughts, only sensations? Weird,
Carlyn, 51, volunteers as a steward, raising money for an otter charity. “It’s totally different from being a punter – it’s a real privilege to see behind the scenes. Everyone’s so happy. They keep high-fiving you.” Sure, you might have missed the Foo Fighters, but on the other hand, it was your honour to tell other people where they’d be playing, using a giant sponge thumb. And you only have to work 20 hours, so that’s, what, 50 other hours of pinging?
15. ‘Own it’ and ‘Style it out’ mean two completely different things
I’ve always used them interchangeably, to mean something like, “Don’t worry about stuff ”. But then Lauren Mayberry’s nipple tape fell off. “Guys, I sweated off my tit stickers,” the Chvrches’ lead singer told the crowd, before removing them altogether in the name of feminism. “This is how little I want men on the internet to see my nipples,” she continued. “I punish myself with these items. Yeah, it was just too sweaty, and they were just going out. One fell down the leg.” She then restarted the song, and this, people, is called owning it. Styling it out would have meant pretending it didn’t happen. These phrases are opposites.
16. Radical campaigners: choose your favourite sticker, and only take that one
Global Justice Now came to Glastonbury with posters and stickers of four slogans: Another World is Possible; Make Polluters Pay; No one is Illegal; Unfuck the World. All sound ideas, no question, except Unfuck the World was so popular that once people had seen that sticker, they didn’t want the other three. They just wanted to grab the world and unfuck it.
17. Dave Grohl is the new Chris Martin
There he is smashing the drums at the back of the Pretenders; how did he