On Saturday afternoon, a Land Rover with Glastonbury’s founder, Michael Eavis, in the passenger seat pulls out of the backstage area, on to a road packed with people that runs between Glastonbury’s Pyramid and Other stages. The crowd don’t just part to let it through: when they realise who’s inside it, they line the sides of the road, not cheering or shouting, but respectfully applauding as it passes.
It’s a sweet and oddly moving scene, and it seems to say something about the first Glastonbury since 2019. Eavis is famous for cropping up in the media towards the end of every festival, loudly proclaiming the preceding days the best Glastonbury ever, an assessment it can be hard to agree with if you have just spent three days watching people’s belongings being washed away, wading through ankle-deep mud or, on one notable occasion, looking on aghast as the operator of an effluent truck presses the wrong button and inadvertently sprays the interior of one of the dance tents with human excrement. You sometimes get the feeling that if a vast sinkhole unexpectedly opened up, swallowing huge sections of the Worthy Farm site, Eavis would stick his head out of it on Sunday afternoon and start waxing lyrical to a reporter about the magical atmosphere and indomitable high spirits in the crowd.
