Beer Festival
I don't know what it is about Glastonbury 2002, but something about it feels very right. I think we have all the hallmarks of a classic festival on our hands here. Maybe its because Glastonbury failed to materialise in 2001 that people seem to be going out of their way to have a good time this year. With temperatures soaring and the sun beating down through an unbroken blue sky you could be forgiven for thinking this was Ibiza and not the West Country. The beer tents are certainly doing extremely well off the back of this very un-British weather.
	I queued for a full fifteen minutes yesterday to get a much needed drop of warm, flat ale, but such is the jovial atmosphere here that there was no pushing, no queue jumping and no shouldering at the bar. People were happy to stand around and chat with one another, which I found almost as refreshing as my pint. A lady working behind a bar who told me that beer sales are already breaking festival records and by mid afternoon on Friday the first casualties caught by the beer monkey were beginning to pile up. There were bodies strewn around the site, wasted and sun-scorched and every single one of them had a smile on their face. So lets all raise our glasses to a summer epic.
Words by Phil Jones Pictures by Alf Goodrich