“How are they sending you to cover a music festival, and they aren’t even giving you a proper place to sleep!” Becka scowled, and I laughed.
“Sorry to disappoint, Princess, but this is practically palatial by Glastonbury standards.” I stood up, and twirled around to illustrate my point. “This tent is massive!”
She sniffed dismissively. “Sure, yeah, okay.”
“I don’t remember you moaning about tents when we did Glasto.”
Becka snorted, smudging the lip liner she was carefully applying.
“I was drunk the entire weekend!”
I threw my arms wide. “That’s the point!”
“I thought the music was the point?”
“A triangle has more than two points,” I said, nodding sagely.
“Oh yeah? What’s the third point?”
“Ask me on Monday.”
Becka laughed.
Initially, I had been worried that coming to Glastonbury on my own would make me feel a bit lonely, but boy, was I wrong. I was camped in a part of the grounds reserved for press and marketing, and my entire day had been spent bumping into people I’d met in my brief career.
Even though I was still a pretty junior journo, I’d spent my fair share of time standing at the back of venues with a microphone, recording the same interviews and press junkets as a hundred other journalists and feature writers, only to later go home and try and turn the same words into a different story, so to be sent on assignment to a music festival so world-renowned as Glastonbury was the dream.
Admittedly, I hadn’t been the first choice to cover it, but the events writer had gotten sick a few days ago and I was free, so, here I was. Every cloud has a silver lining, and all that.
This was the first time Glastonbury had been put on since the world took a two-year hiatus, and you could feel it. Walking through the crowds of people, you could feel a difference in the atmosphere that was hard to explain. It felt somewhere between glee, and anxiety. A forced kind of brevity as people tried to be comfortable again.
Even though the country had been more-or-less open for a while now, it was still a bit unnerving to be around so many people. In London people were more than happy to give you a wide berth – unless you were on the wrong side of the escalator in the underground – but here, in these sunny pastures filled with so many varieties of humans, it was startling.
But then, I reasoned, Glasto was always a bit of a shock to the system, and I tried to surrender myself to the ebb and flow.
Bumping into so many industry colleagues could have felt like one of those conferences we were dragged to twice a year, but something about strutting around a field in wellies, holding a lukewarm beer and feeling the back of your neck burning because you hadn’t applied enough sunscreen made it feel more like a school trip.
For an hour or so, I walked around the press area, taking in the lay of the land.
There were two types of journalists, I’d come to realise.
The serious types with BBC aspirations, and the rest of us.
Culture and lifestyle writers usually fell firmly into the second category.
Somewhere around late afternoon, I bumped into the small crew fromPebblemagazine – a very much alternative publication – the type of folk you’d associate with healing circles at music festivals. Very much the Good Vibes crowd.
Once they’d realised I was on my own, they had immediately absorbed me into their bubble, and honestly, it was probably the most fun I’d had in so long I couldn’t even remember.
It had started innocently enough with a sound bath in a brightly coloured yurt, but some combination of the stuffy air, a mason jar of kombucha that tasted suspiciously like cider, and the hazy incense made me so sleepy that I missed half the main acts. The guys assured me that they had enough footage to go around, and were happy to share. I let them drag me off to a drum circle, where a woman who didn’t look a day under seventy told me that I badly needed to rearrange my chakras, with all the intensity of a doctor delivering the news that I only had days to live.
I politely thanked her, but declined her offer of assistance.
It was a miracle that I woke up the next morning in my lonely, 8-man tent with nothing worse than a raging thirst, and the desire to never drink Kombucha ever again.
I spent the second day actually doing my job – alongside day-drinking with myPebblebuddies, but in my defence, that was the price of entry to get an interview with some of the performers.
Just because I had a shiny press pass around my neck did not grant me immediate access to the hospitality tents – the nice kind, with roped-off areas and refrigerated drinks. However, Dave fromPebblewas surprisingly well-connected.
