You know how it is: you're at a festival and you really need some gear. A few discreet inquiries only reveal that there's a bit of a shortage this year but you persist in your quest and eventually in a corner of a far-flung field you come across two shifty-looking youths who look like they might have what you want. After a hurried and tense conversation, you hand over your £20 and get some grade-A, factor-15 sunscreen.
Forget about cocaine, ecstasy and marijuana; this year the black market belonged to sunscreen. Because it had rained incessantly for the previous two festivals, most people had packed wellingtons over sunscreen this year and were ill-prepared for the perpetually blazing sun. On day two of the Sun Crisis (as we came to call it), the festival organisers intervened and arranged a lorry-load of supplies to be brought in and 600 litres of the precious elixir were distributed free to the happy campers. After all, sunburn is so 1980s.
Mind you, if we had listened to the mad old hippies/shamans in the village on the way down who told us that hot weather was guaranteed because they had formed a "sun circle" the night before and implored the forces of light and brightness to do their thing for the weekend, we would have emptied the chemist, rather than the off-licence, of their wares. Still, live and learn - or in this case: drink and burn.
Nothing prepares you for the sight of 100,000 people converging on Michael Eavis's farm in Somerset's Vale of Avalon for the three-day experience which is the Glastonbury Festival. Positive karma abounds: You're as good as personally welcomed onto the site; there's much talk of "vibes"; and the security staff who wander around in T-shirts and jeans practically lead you by the hand to wherever you want to go.
Set on 600 acres, Glasto is an instantly-built city - the size of nearby Bath. It's a place where reading the programme alone takes up a few hours. There's the Main Stage, the Other Stage, the Dance Tent, the Acoustic Stage, the Theatre Space, the Big Top, the Circus Arena, the Jazz World Stage, the New Tent, the Outdoor Cinema, the Bank, the Radio Station, the Meeting Point, the Green Roadshow, the Craft Field . . .
The sheer scale of it all, though, is the least of your worries: it's who to go to see, where and when? If you want to see Patti Smith on the Acoustic Stage, you'll have to leave Underworld on the Main Stage early and risk not being back on time for the Manic Street Preachers. Also, that will cut in to seeing The Super Furry Animals on the Other Stage and totally rule out any chance of catching The Chemical Brothers in The Dance Tent. Decisions, decisions: The Beautiful South or Fatboy Slim?, Courtney Love or Wilco?, Bill Bailey or Marianne Faithfull?, Gay Dad or The Cosmic Tambourines? Oh dear, better go up to the Healing Field and get my energy levels readjusted. And maybe a holistic massage while I'm at it. Glastonbury still revels in its "peace and love, man" image that may have been "right on" when the festival started in 1969 but these days is just a quaint, pat-on-the-head anachronism for those of us of the post-punk generation. Still, they persist in giving a quarter of the considerable festival space over to New Age-style "projects". If it's not the performance poet in the Eco-theatre doing a elegiac 20 minutes on the Rainbow Warrior, it's a Shen Qi workshop which will give you "super-creative energy" and instruct you how to "do nothing, but still get everything".
Passing by the Travelling Homeopathic Collective Clinic, The Herbal First Aid Tent (I kid you not), and the Recycled Metals Sculpting Centre, you can stop off for a cup of organic cappuccino and some hash truffles as you continue your ascent to the now-of-mythic-proportions Healing Field. The hash truffles aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing, so it's time to try out the natural energy balls (which look like something a dog would cough up, but never mind).
After a quick waltz around "The Sacred Space" - basically just a field full of crusties drinking cider around some vertical stones, the Healing Field reveals itself: there's nobody in the Holistic Massage Tent so instead it's over to the Tree Spirit Space where you can light a candle or some incense and sit cross-legged on the floor for some "quiet meditation" (thanks, but no thanks, longhaired person). A visit to the Healing Arts Workshop throws up talks on Making Constructive Use of Your Negative Emotions and Practical Dowsing and Earth Acupuncture, at which point I run screaming down the hill and back to the relative sanity of the Dance Tent where, bizarrely, I find myself frugging alongside the editor of the Guardian newspaper to The Chemical Brothers (way to go, Mr Rusbridger).
The massive popularity of dance music for today's festival-goers means that while Fatboy Slim, Carl Cox, The Scratch Perverts et al attracted tens of thousands to the dance set, other big names in the genre, such as Paul Oakenfold, Underworld and Orbital had to be moved to bigger stages to satisfy demand.
Rock-wise, Courtney Love (who helicoptered into the site with Michael Stipe - the other REMers, and me, took the train) was an early highlight and never has Celebrity Skin sounded so good as when Ms Love spat out the lyrics "When I wake up in my make-up; have you ever felt so used up as this; hooker/waitress/model/actress; no second billing because you're a star now; Oh Cinderella - they aren't sluts like you."
Later the same evening there was a real Glasto moment when towards the end of their midnight set, REM did a poignant version of Everybody Hurts and thrilled one and all by digging out (This One Goes Out To) The One I Love from their back catalogue. The official hit of the festival, though, belongs to Fatboy Slim whose mix of his own The Rockefeller Skank, which segued into The Rolling Stones's Satisfaction and was so massively bangin' that he hopes it's going to be released as a post-festival single.
"Mick Jagger really likes it," says Fatboy Slim (a.k.a. Norman Cook or Mr Zoe Ball, depending on where you're coming from), "but Allan Klein (The Stones' ex-manager and music publisher) actually owns Satisfaction. There's a lot of negotiations going on. I'd really like to do it and Mick would really like to do it. Neither of us would make any money out of it but it'd be a laugh," he says.
Other notable acts included Gomez, whom I never really got until I saw them doing their Delta blues stuff under a big moon on The Other Stage; The Super Furry Animals smashing it up; an exceptionally good set from Carl Cox; and The Manics headlining the Main Stage and going for broke with pumped-up versions of Motorcycle Emptiness and Motown Junk. Awesome stuff.
Irishwise, new Dublin talent Paddy Casey won over a lot of new friends with two banging gigs and piled on the charm, Mary Coughlan was superb, and Ash came on like they were the last guitar band in the world, sounding like a mix of Therapy? and early Nirvana.
Elsewhere, it was no sleep, toxic levels of scrumpy, futile arguments with Eco Warriors (Me: "You know that thing that got you to the festival, it's called a road - they have their uses sometimes"; Them: "Leave the fields alone"), peering pruriently through the window of Radiohead's Thom Yorke's unfeasibly large Winnebago, and getting lost - everywhere and all the time. And already booking tickets for next year's bash. It's simply the best (man).
