I’ve only been to Glastonbury once, and I have to admit it was done in a most convivial way. The year was 2011, when the Pyramid Stage headliners were Beyoncé on the Sunday, festival perennials Coldplay on the Saturday, and, in something of a tour de force performance on the Friday, U2, interrupting their mammoth 360 tour. The day before the gig, we had flown in on a chartered jet fresh from their show in Baltimore, been whisked to the Royal Crescent Hotel in Bath. The next day we were all choppered onto the Glasto site, picked up by a fleet of Mercedes and delivered backstage.
This year, however, the cool hotel to stay in is The Newt, centred around a limestone Georgian pile, Hadspen House, which is just 20 minutes by car from the festival site. Crucially, it is only a few minutes by helicopter - when I went to stay a few weeks ago, a chopper landed on the grounds in front of the property, something which obviously happens so often that people barely took any notice of it.
