The first hurdle is always tickets. When I was 13, my parents - wonderful people but terrible influences - took me to the outskirts of Glastonbury Festival so that we could all have UV entry stamps embossed onto our arms by a gang of enterprising Scousers. We had such a superb weekend that we went the official route next time, with real tickets and everything. I went every year, never ever taking my wrist band off, manky scraps of fabric climbing further up my arm as I sought to show everyone that I was Glastonbury and Glastonbury was me.
This all came crashing down in 2013 when, after 14 years of constructing my identity around this one weekend a year, I simply couldn’t get a ticket. Nor could I for the next festival, nor the one after that. I’d been kicked out of my own party and, desperate to blame something, I blamed social media. Demand outstripping supply had turned ticket buying into an Olympic sport.
