My first time: “I was, whether I liked it or not, a Glastonbury person now”

I really think it will be Spaghetti Beard Guy who stays most firmly fixed in my mind. In the future, when I am scouring hazy memories of my very first Glastonbury, I’m pretty sure this will be the image that will prove most indelible. Which, to clarify, was a guy holding an open pack of value spaghetti and inviting passing strangers to wedge strands of it – Kerplunk! style – in his bushy, faintly Amish beard. To be clear: it wasn’t so much that it was all that weird in isolation (set against other people’s stories of raving, stark naked drug casualties and scatological horror, it’s almost laughably tame).

It was more that, only a few hours after I had arrived at Worthy Farm, I barely blinked or broke stride; the trippy, occasionally feral reality of the granddaddy of British music festivals had fully claimed me. I was, whether I liked it or not, a Glastonbury person now. And a man with a face full of dried pasta was – alongside the rising, fetid waft from long drop toilets, patchy phone signal and endless walking – just one of the things I accepted.

There’s no denying how strange it is to explore somewhere you’ve never visited but feel you know intimately. Having been an inadvertent first-timer rather than a deliberate one, the circumstances of my Glastonbury virginity (at the age of 38) had come to feel a little complicated. On the one hand – as I’m sure refuseniks have been angrily screaming at the TV and radio all weekend – it is literally just one of many music festivals, rather than some totemic marker of your social status or the apex of all human achievement. But then, on the other, I really did want to go. Even if only to stop Glastonbury veteran mates banging on about leylines and “special energy” and telling me, with a little knowing laugh, that I just wouldn’t understand it until I went.

Over the years of religiously watching on TV, I had learned that Glasto FOMO was a sort of pendulum; swinging from those moments when you would give everything to be teleported to the front of the Pyramid for Stormzy, to that almost intoxicating smugness on Monday when you wake up, in your bed, and you haven’t got to pack up a tent on a crushing four-day hangover. Now, in time for the momentous, Covid-delayed 50th anniversary of the thing, I would see what it was like when the welly was on the other foot.

The scale of it hit me by degrees. Strolling away from my hurriedly pitched tent on Friday morning (this, by the way, is the perfect time to arrive if you want to be searching frantically for the last slivers of campsite space in the slow-falling drizzle), I made a mental note that it wasn’t as mind-blowingly massive as everyone had made out. But then it just kept going and going; a seemingly infinite loop of tents and bars and a rolling human tide who seemed to either look very determined or like they desperately needed a cuddle.

The fact that Glastonbury is a festival of social logistics, as much as anything else, was a surprise. So much time, energy and sign-posting inflatables are employed in the name of keeping big, unruly groups of people together in circumstances where that is almost impossible. It feels – without wishing to over intellectualise something that is, in a very material sense, just loads of people getting on it in a field – that there’s a specifically British tension between the endless busywork of making plans and a looser sort of burn-it-all, bacchanalian abandon.

This is what makes the terrible phone reception a weird gift. You submit to the chaos of the place because you have to. But on the other side of frustratedly trying to call someone – or sending endless, radio delay WhatsApp messages saying things like “by the ‘Work Event’ flag” – is the euphoria of finding them. Just as I had given up trying to locate some friends in Block9’s industrial, after-hours playground, I found a pocket of signal, directions pinged through and the entire night turned on its axis. I could have wept. Though, it should be said, I was already very, very tired.

Basically, everyone I knew that I bumped into made a gag about me reviewing the food stalls there and, well, I did end up seeking solace in what I could cram into my gob. Glastonbury, compared to the new wave of food-oriented festivals, is not known as a gastronomic hotbed (a place of “shit chow mien”, as I heard one Scouse guy put it, with something like fondness, when we were trooping in). Even so, I found some good stuff; London traders Burger & Beyond’s peerless Bacon Butter Cheeseburger; halloumi fries from Habibi; a beautifully warming vegan tagine from Strummerville and Staffordshire oatcakes, loaded with cheese and crisped on the griddle like Potteries quesadillas.

I think a stranger in a toilet queue may have recommended that last one. And, actually, that is probably my most abiding memory of the weekend. Almost everyone I met was friendly and helpful and generous to a degree that is slightly unnerving for a chitchat-averse Londoner. From the girls who helped me get my tent into position as I flailed in the rain to the veteran of 18 festivals who insisted on walking me to a bar I was struggling to find, there is a really robust spirit of collectively making sure that everyone gets the most out of it. Whether their version of a good time is watching Andy Burnham on The Left Field stage or pogoing madly to Wet Leg. I know. This is all sounding a bit leylines and special energy isn’t it? But it is hard to not be affected by the eccentric warmth of the place.

Ultimately, you will probably know very quickly whether Glastonbury in real life is for you. Either you go, stagger back with PTSD and a backpack of manky, rain-drenched clothes, and swear you’ll never do it again. Or, if you are lucky – with the weather, the music and the people you are with – you will be like me and feel, annoying as it is to admit, that you finally get it. Though I say this having been freshly reminded that there is little that can nudge you to the brink like trying to stuff a sleeping bag back into its little sheath.

Now that I have done both, watching Glastonbury at home almost feels like the equivalent of a sugar-free version of a soft drink; pleasurable in a familiar way, definitely better for your health and yet, on some elemental level, not quite the same as the real thing. As it turns out, the most annoying thing about Glastonbury ultras banging on about its unique vibe is that they may actually be right. There’s no sense in fighting it. See you next year Spaghetti Beard Guy.