As I write this, I am on a train on my way to Glastonbury and, I must admit, I am a little trepidatious.
With the weather forecast predicting four days of constant, blinding sunshine, and an average temperature of 72 degrees, I am having to ask myself: “What are you going to do, Moran? Your Glastonbury chops have been honed over more than a decade of driving, filthy rain, oomska up to your fanjo, and an unquenchable Blitz spirit, perpetuated by leaning against a bin at 9am, taking sly hits from a bottle of supermarket whisky and telling yourself that it’s because ‘alcohol kills the trenchfoot germs’. What are you going to do now it’s shaping up to be like Ibiza Uncovered — all babes in bikinis, wearing inexplicably annoying straw cowboy hats, and floating around a blazing sunlit idyll? Will the keg of Lidl whisky go to waste?”
And of course, the answer is “no”. Of course not. I shall simply shotgun it with cold Coke, instead of hot tea. That is survival of the species.
But there can be no doubt that this Glastonbury will come as a shock to many people. To put this in perspective, the last time it didn’t rain at Glastonbury, it was 1992, I was 17, and still a Goth.
Ironically, I was FURIOUS that it was sunny — my black velvet dresses looked incongruous in a field, and all my evil Panstick sweated off, leaving me looking unwontedly benign.
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Now that I’m 35, however, I wholly welcome our thermal overlord, the Sun. I’m looking forward to simple Glastonbury pleasures, not experienced since John Major was on the throne: not having to whittle two kilos of mud off my boots using a small plastic fork.
Not watching the rain filling my tray of cheap noodles with what I came to think of as “Glastonbury gravy”.
Being able to sit down on the ground without having to find a broken crate, two planks and a bin bag, and engaging in the kind of civil engineering project usually associated with Dutch repoldering projects around the Zuiderzee.
The lack of children drowning around the Cider Bus. And seeing people really, really happy.
Glastonbury is always a merry location, even when the ground has an actual, visible current.
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But in a woozy, midsummer haze — that once-a-year moment of stillness, where it feels that all the clocks have stopped at “June” — you can dance and talk and roam the hills all night long. Rain does not stop play. The games last all weekend.
Not least because everyone knows that, statistically, there won’t be another sunny Glastonbury until 2028.