Glastonbury. I'm not going in.

Glastonbury (10 miles north of Bruton) is like a Somerset summer Christmas with bells on and 500 bass bins. It's all anyone talks about for weeks and I'm not going. Am I bovvered? What do you think?

Last night I sat in my garden listening to Glastonbury. Not listening, it was more accurately described as hearing. I could hear thumping bass, happy human screams and a muffled wall of distant sound so immense it could travel ten miles from there to here where I was sat on the step. The Pyramid Stage alone has 54 subwoofers. It’s not surprising the bass carries. I lit a cigarette, hoping to lift my dopamine depleted FOMO enhanced flatness, but it just gave me a sore throat.

After about one am, you can’t hear Glastonbury in the distance so well. It was the night shift I always loved, the religious tramping between the naughty bits where the “night people” were. Block 9, Shangri La, Lost Vagueness, the Rabbit Hole and up (was it up, or down, I don’t know) at the Stone Circle where I’d suffer the inevitable systemic crash just as the “day people” were getting their frying pans and toothbrushes out for their shift watching bands and listening to comedians and important political talks.

Glastonbury. Expensive. Hassle. But unmissable expensive hassle, no?

Of course I felt frothing terrible FOMO. I knew this was coming. Regret-fuelled, nobody-loves-me sensations were the emotional price I’d pay for not hustling harder for a ticket, or accepting the one that was offered to me a few weeks back. But I have my reasons and they are complex ones.

It is a very specific feeling of abandonment being outside the party listening in. Living in Notting Hill for nearly 40 years, I was familiar with it from those pre-cell phone years when I’d sometimes lose my friends and trudge through the beer cans of Carnival under the late summer sunshine surrounded by people blowing whistles and dancing but with my head hung and shoulders hunched against the internal storm of poor me raining down. It is a very specific feeling. Do you know it? It can also arise when a party happens that everyone seems to be going to except you.

Hey ho, life’s can’t be all ups as I’ve been remind myself for years.

Notting Hill Carnival is cost free fun, it’s an epicly affordable beast compared to Glastonbury. However, doing it minus a chum is not to be attempted. One year in the nineties I walked home by myself having lost everyone only to feel the serotonergic tsunami of a…