I belong to Glasto!

Despite the mud, the blood, the scrapes and the stench, Paul Carter tells Michael Eavis, I’ll be back!

As you have already seen elsewhere in the pages of this fine publication, I recently had the privilege of spending five days living in utter filth with the great unwashed, or, to give it its proper title, attending the Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts.

Now, I know you all think you know what Glastonbury is like. After all, it gets such wall to wall media coverage that aside from the mud and the lingering aroma of a not too distant cesspit, you could actually forgive yourself for thinking you were there.

Let me put an end to that myth immediately. You have no idea what it’s like. No idea at all. Until you have spent over an hour attempting to make a journey that should take ten minutes, through mud so slippery I’m surprised it hasn’t been harvested as an industrial grade lubricant, then frankly my friends, you haven’t lived.

I also broke my own record for sustaining a personal injury – precisely three minutes after leaving my tent. I slipped and fell onto rubble and cut myself, attractively covering the ends of both my arms in blood, much to many people’s horror. I think some of them saw the blood and thought for a second that my arms had actually just that second come off. I like to think so.

Anyway, I digress. I’m no physicist. But I’m fairly certain I’ve discovered something. I’m calling it the Glastonbury paradox. You see, in what was without a shadow of a doubt the most inhospitable, inaccessible environment for a disabled person I could ever have imagined finding, the people suddenly became the most helpful, considerate and good natured I’ve ever met.

Maybe that’s what people are like outside of London in general, I don’t know. At Glastonbury though, it was different. People camping nearby helped put my tent up (ok so it wasn’t so much “help” as “do the whole thing while I watch with a beer”), and during the aforementioned sludge trudge, complete strangers were practically dragging me through the mud. In a nice way (if there is a nice way to be dragged through mud) or lifting me over boggy trenches.

Admittedly a number of these people were more than likely “medicated”, shall we say, but I don’t care. Glastonbury Samaritans, in the extremely unlikely event that you remember dragging a bewildered, slightly overweight disabled man in a silly hat to the Pyramid stage, then I salute you.

So, what with the mud, the blood, the storms and traumas, you’re probably thinking that I won’t be going back next year. Aren’t you? Well? Aren’t you? Well you’re wrong. Ha. It was brilliant, and I wouldn’t have changed a thing. Apart from possibly the mud. 2010? You betcha. Glastonbury, I think I love you.