Is anyone else feeling a little “end of days” right now? London’s Tube stations are in meltdown — Mad Max: Caledonian Road — while drivers are remortgaging their homes in order to finance the trip to the big supermarket on Sunday; there, there is looting in the frozen aisle. People are rightly miserable. Generally, the vibes feel pretty “off”.
But for 200,000 or so of us there is (temporary) salvation on the horizon. This is not my bid to recruit you to my elite Satanic death cult — although I have drunk the Kool Aid. For it is T-24 hours until Glastonbury — nirvana! —and I can talk of literally nothing else. The fact that reality is currently such a colossal letdown only makes the idea of going feral in a field sound even more appealing.
The first rule of Worthy Farm? Reality simply doesn’t exist — and suddenly, just like that, you are free. Your phone becomes a phone again, not a porta-parasite which you touch, 89 times an hour, condemning your rattled mind to an Escher loop of push notifications and WhatsApp and Instagram stories by people you worked with a decade ago. In this way, Glastonbury is more relaxing than five days by the pool — stay with me here — for have you ever lasted more than five minutes on a sun lounger without checking your emails? Thought not.
Indeed, at Worthy, you forget that you have a job; you forget you have a sense of purpose. In fact, down on the farm, the idea that you regularly attend an office and complete complicated tasks seems not just odd, but baffling. There, only your most primal needs (sleep, thirst, hunger) must be served — nothing else matters. News alerts? Don’t know her.
What’s more, the more feral you become, the more you realise that you sort of like it. Perhaps showering is simply a bourgeois affectation, or perhaps a scam set up by Big Shampoo. You realise that you do not need your entire wardrobe — just a sandal, a weatherproof shoe and a pair of adidas trackies — and you do not need yoga, or vitamins or balance: you just get a bag of chips and a cider and then you go again.
You also realise that, contrary to what you think most of the time — in the queue for coffee; on the bus; in every meeting ever — you don’t actually hate people at all. People are magical — people are kind and well-meaning and offer you a spare blister plaster when they see you hopping around the Green Fields with a seeping foot. It’s the system that’s broken! The system being that you can’t just spend all your time dancing in a field with lots of strangers and absolutely no responsibilities.
Many of you will doubt this — hi, Mum! — and insist that they can think of nothing worse than sleeping in a canvas bag in the middle of a makeshift city for five days, that they can think of nothing worse than dry shampooing their matted hair into submission while a friend sticks their head under a cold tap to try and “jumpstart” their brain.
To this, I say: nothing makes you appreciate reality more when you’re back.
In other news...
On the topic of reality, I binge-listened to Unreal last week, a 10-part podcast by journalists and broadcasters Pandora Sykes and Sirin Kale that explores the fascinating and fatuous world of reality TV. It is an intelligent deep-dive into the genre’s canon — featuring Big Brother, The X Factor, the Kardashians and Love Island — that manages to be both sympathetic and excoriating, and illustrates the way that, watch it or not, the genre has shaped moods and trends, all the while reflecting our society’s baser instincts.
It’s not all bad, though. In Unreal’s analysis of pop cultural moods of the last two decades you realise — whisper it — that we’ve come a long way since some of the more tasteless attitudes that used to dominate the mainstream.
You also realise that 15 years on, you cannot imagine a world where the Kardashians don’t exist...
