Glastonbury Festival

Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud

We’ve been so lucky at Glastonbury this year: the heavens opened and those nasty green fields were transformed into delicious, oozing, gloopy rivers of mud. Yum.

Yes, mud is disgusting stuff whose uncanny ability to insinuate itself onto every part of your body, wardrobe and tent is only matched by its resistance to all forms of washing bar power-showers (remember them?). When it sets in terminally at Glastonbury, a mood of disappointment, even depression, sets in at the festival. But it never lasts. Admit it: while mud may change the Glastonbury experience, it does not diminish it.

The very essence of Glastonbury is human adaptability. Most of the year, we sit in our houses with running water, satellite TV, fridges and cookers, getting wound up by half-a-day’s accumulation of washing up. But do we really need all the luxuries that we take so much for granted that we don’t even notice them? Glastonbury teaches us, every year, that we don’t.

Like everyone else, when the rain set in on Friday morning, I entertained hope that it would let up before the earth at Worthy Farm reached that crucial saturation point. But when it went past the mud-point of no return, I actually enjoyed wheeling out those peculiar skills that you develop purely for negotiating a muddy Festival.

First off, it was on with the waterproof trousers and wellies, former tucked into latter. I don’t mean to be rude, but anyone who doesn’t bring wellies to Glastonbury is a fool. They may be unglamorous and difficult to dance in, but their Monster Truck-style soles offer better grip even than walking boots, and their height provides an important weapon in the fight to keep muddiness at the extremities of your body.

Once the floor turns brown at Glastonbury, everyone becomes an instant expert in mud. You learn how to distinguish between minute variations in viscosity and gauge quagmire depths to within millimetres at a mere glance, under flickery torchlight while stoned. You employ exaggerated care when walking downhill. You recalculate rendezvous times, and develop new routes that avoid the more Carboniferous swamps.

You also change your attitude: mud at Glastonbury breeds more effective planning. As muddy journeys require more effort, you want to make sure they will be worthwhile. You give standpipes and the areas around the old-style open latrines a wide berth. You seek out the centres of the main thoroughfares, whichare slightly arched so that mud oozes to their sides. And you make far fewer tent visits, due to the annoying rigmarole of removing your wellies (it took me ages to formulate a repeatable method of removing mine without covering my hands in mud, but I reckon I’ve cracked it now).

You’d also imagine that fear of losing bodily control and experiencing full mud immersion would lead to a curbing of drug and alcohol-fuelled excesses. But that clearly was not the case this year.

Mud adds to your enjoyment of Glastonbury. You find new pleasures – such as the luxury of finding a luxurious ten-yard stretch of grass on which to walk (even though you waded through an extra thirty yards of six-inch-deep liquid clay to get to it). You feel a glow at having access to the parts of the site that are lined with those glorious metal slatted duckboards.

But more than anything, you feel twice as satisfied when you manage to have just as good a time as usual at Glastonbury, even though it is a mudbath. And of course, there is the extra joy of tormenting your weekend-raver mates who stayed away because they were afraid – afraid! – of a little bit of mud. Give them your contempt. And give thanks for mud.

Steve Boxer

Pyramid 2002

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