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“A pair of good boots should be fine; wellies are a bit OTT” – BBC News pre-Glastonbury Weather Forecast

There was a point, some time on Friday morning, around the time I had finally stopped bailing out our non-waterproof borrowed tent, decamped to the spare (thanks Rob…) and begun hoping my soggy jeans would dry while wiping away the mud that had encrusted on my feet after wading through a pool of indeterminately composed filth on an abortive flip-flopped journey down to the Guardian lounge (Sally, still warm, non-smelly and untouched by mud, had both pairs of wellies with her in London at this point, and the stalls on the site had all sold out), when I considered–gasp–leaving the Glastonbury site before I’d even seen a band. Of course I would never have actually done something so recklessly stupid, but the thought crossed my mind, just for a second.

It had all been so different when I headed to the site on a pleasantly summery Wednesday afternoon and evening, watching the green rolling countryside outside the train window and chatting to the man sitting opposite to me who–last of a dying breed–was planning to walk the 6 miles from Castle Cary station to the site and attempt to get in by jumping the fence. “Nice night for it, I suppose,” I suggested.

When I finally reached Rob and Claire and the tents in our usual prime sub-pylon spot on the hill by the Pyramid stage, the sunshine had already made me sweatier than I’d hoped to be, given that I wasn’t planning to wash until the following Monday, but I tried to put this small matter out of my mind, and we spent the sunny evening and the following sunny day lounging around the site, trying not to burn and drinking rather a lot of pleasant pear cider (a welcome new addition this year). I think at one point I called Sal to say that, no, actually, things were glorious here and she really didn’t need to bring the wellies along after all (that weather chap on the BBC website who said that wellies would be “a bit OTT” was obviously right all along).

Things started to go wrong at around 4am on Friday morning, when I was woken by our loud Scottish neighbours, who as far as I could tell appeared to be camped in my head, when they returned to their tents, turned their radio on to some awful station playing S Club 7 records, and began having a loud party. Somehow I managed to resist the urge to tell them to shut up, and instead I meekly attempted to get myself back to sleep while cursing myself for not taking Rob up on his offer of earplugs after I’d mentioned something about being kept awake the previous night by a Jeanette Crankie soundalike who seemed to have talked continually for most of the night, but never actually formed words or sentences, just unintelligible grunts. I finally dropped back to sleep sometime between 5 and 6, as an eerie silence, and some unusually strong winds, descended on the site… When I woke again I could feel a strange dampness at the bottom of my sleeping bag, and it was shortly after this that I looked around the tent in horror to see water dripping in everywhere. As I later discovered, seeing the rivers of mud and the lakes that had formed elsewhere on the site, it could have been much worse, but that was little consolation to me at the time as I sat huddled in the middle of the most ridiculously designed non-waterproof tent I have ever encountered, listening to the storms pass overhead, counting the gaps–or lack of them–between the thunder and lightning, and wondering if it was safe to trek up towards the toilets any time soon.

But then, of course, as then always do, things got better. I was forced to sit in the tent listening to the woeful noodling of the John Butler Trio, while the last significant rain of the weekend landed on the site, but after that I was able to venture out–cautiously, still lacking wellingtons–to watch The Thrills play their cheery west coast sub-Beach Boys anthems, and then The Zutons play their scally sub-The Coral anthems. Anticipating the imminent arrival of Ms Hislop and the gang, I stayed back on one of the few remaining grassy bits of the field for this, so I was unable to share my amusement with Rob and Claire, who were much closer to the front, at the fact that not once but twice the lead singer of The Zutons urged the crowd to sing along only to be met with complete silence from a set of festival goers who might well have been enjoying the performance, but not nearly well enough to actually know any of the words. A slight overestimation of their popularity, perhaps.

Shortly after that, as Elvis Costello turned up, so did my wellies my beautiful girlfriend, who just happened to have some wellies with her, along with the rest of the gang. Suddenly liberated, it was time to start wading through lakes of effluent, buy some overpriced food, and start drinking cider. Yay!

Suitably sated, we watched The Doves for the second time in the space of a week, shared most of a bottle of vodka and ploughed into our first box of wine, which we somehow polished off just in time for The Killers to take to the stage for a set of their big crowd-pleasing songs. Indie Rock and Roll for me, indeed. Sadly, The White Stripes provided a rather poor end to the first day proper. Don’t get me wrong, I like The White Stripes and I have a lot of their records, and I really enjoyed seeing them the last time they were at Glasto back in 2002, but this time it all just seemed a bit rubbish (Blue Orchid, and Jolene excepted), so it was something of a relief that we had other plans, and we all trekked up to The Tadpole Stage way up in the Green Fields to indulge Rob in his obsession with Lou Rhodes, who was launching her solo career with a few small-scale performances. Such a shame then that all we got to see before all of us bar Rob and Claire departed, exhausted, to our tents was an hour of hot roadie action. Curse the small stages and their inaccurate running times, I thought, as we headed for bed, the first day over.