Glastonbury

95% of stuff I watch on BBC is on iPlayer anyway as I can watch it in my own time, obviously football and Breakfast news I watch live so I don't care that a channel is devoted to the festival.

I'm not really into music a great deal, so not my thing. However in the early 90s when a few of my friends went, it was all about the experience for them, but these days I see the tickets cost around £360 per head, hardly something a student can afford, it's priced for the middle aged.

 

Taking bookings for 2025:
https://www.thepopuphotel.com/rooms/burt-grand/

£4300 for four nights in a bed under canvas, no bathroom. But you do get scatter cushions.

 

So they provide something to wipe with but no where to do your business?

 

I saw Dexys at Camden Palace a couple of weeks ago. They were excellent and Kev is far more mobile than he appeared to be at 'Glastonbury.

 

The sight of Jo Whiley and other pensioners still employed by the BBC pretending to be teenagers is unseemly

 

I think you’re confusing commercialism with the fact it’s simply all over the BBC all weekends and they also book well known acts.

If you focus on the festival itself, it’s just about the least commercial festival there is, at least as far as major ones are concerned, and by quite some distance.

They donate at least £1m each to their main three charities every year, the stewarding in the main is run by Oxfam, there is no commercial branding anywhere on any stages, no sponsored stages, no chain vendors (aside from an onsite Co-op, but they have strong links to Pilton the local town) all independent food retailers.

You can also take your own alcohol anywhere you like, even bars, on Sunday night I was in a bar playing indie tunes drinking my own alcohol I had brought with me, they doing that anywhere in the world, let alone a supposedly commercial festival.

There is also an incredible amount to see and do beyond the main stages you see publicised, who cares if Dua Lipa or yawnmongers are playing the Pyramid stage, when you’ve got 100+ other stages going on at the same time. I saw one act on the Pyramid all weekend and it was probably my best Glastonbury so far.

 

You are the guy from the Vaccines ?

 

In 1972 me & some mates went hiking and camping around Wiltshire & Somerset for our summer hols, the year after the first ‘Glastonbury Fair’, as the 1970 Pilton Music Festival was renamed. That 1971 festival was free, got about 12,000 attendees and left behind as a residue a group of new age druids etc who were not well liked by the local population. Not that we were particularly aware of that; we were 16 years old with typically long hair and scruffy clothes after all that hiking through a standard English summer.
We decided to enter a local hostelry for a ploughman’s lunch and a couple of beers. Noticing a couple of looks from the bar staff best described as ‘askance’ we decided to play safe and send Tom to the bar, being as he sported sufficient bum fluff on his chin to appear something vaguely akin to a beard.
As he reached the bar, we were sure he was asked ‘you baint be nippers, be you?’. Anxious to not be denied our pints of cider, he replied in his gruffest possible voice ‘No, we’re all old enough’, only to engender the reply ‘Oh no, dearie, I knows you’re not 18, just checking you baint be none of them there ‘IPPIES, cos we don’t serve them sort in here.’
Upon receiving reassurances we were just hiking around visiting various archaeological sites for a school project (!), we were told to ‘sit quiet in the corner there, and you’ll be alright for a couple of drinks, but no more.’
When we went up the Tor later, the mess and debris left inside & around St Michael’s Tower put it in some sort of perspective.

 

And this was the point that I realised all sense had left the universe and the gap between the rich and the hot polloi had become excessive.

 

Hot? Predictive texting I assume!

 

******* predictive text