I really think it will be Spaghetti Beard Guy who stays most firmly fixed in my mind. In the future, when I am scouring hazy memories of my very first Glastonbury, I’m pretty sure this will be the image that will prove most indelible. Which, to clarify, was a guy holding an open pack of value spaghetti and inviting passing strangers to wedge strands of it – Kerplunk! style – in his bushy, faintly Amish beard. To be clear: it wasn’t so much that it was all that weird in isolation (set against other people’s stories of raving, stark naked drug casualties and scatological horror, it’s almost laughably tame).
It was more that, only a few hours after I had arrived at Worthy Farm, I barely blinked or broke stride; the trippy, occasionally feral reality of the granddaddy of British music festivals had fully claimed me. I was, whether I liked it or not, a Glastonbury person now. And a man with a face full of dried pasta was – alongside the rising, fetid waft from long drop toilets, patchy phone signal and endless walking – just one of the things I accepted.
