There wasn’t generally a plan to write anything today, but think of this as a kind of epilogue to proceedings this weekend. Overall it has been a brilliant festival, very well organised on the most part, with a fantastic line-up and more entertainment than ever before throughout the site. There were magical secret gigs, wonderful new stages, including the fantastic Park area run by Emily Eavis, and on the whole everyone coped a lot better with the mud and rain than two years ago.

 

You may look at the picture above and think that it shows the festival in full flow, depicted beautifully from above. You would be half right. It is indeed Glastonbury, however this picture was taken today (Tuesday 26 June) more than 24 hours after the festival officially closed its doors. What you can see above is the reminants of thousands upon thousands of people’s belongings that they have left behind, mostly tents.

 

Now let me put something into context here. It rained all day yesterday. It didn’t even pause for breathe. The average two man tent costs roughly £30 from Millets, £15 between the pair of you. Now if you have a choice between packing away your tent or, for the sake of a poxy £15, not getting absolutely drenched in the rain and abandoning it, what would you do? Mr Eavis has been (rightly) strongly criticised by the media today for the appalling bus and coach services yesterday. We arrived at the bus station at the top end of the site at 6am only to have to wait for two hours for a bus to take us to the newly-moved drop-off point. It was cold, wet and because of the mud, extremely painful as there was nowhere to put your rucksack down. We finally got on the bus only to be informed by the driver that there were only two buses making the 45 minute round trip to the drop-off point, one of which had broken down with gearbox trouble. He also pointed out that under half the company’s fleet were being used, because they were worried about getting the buses dirty for the school run later that day.

 

 

There isn’t much that would stop people going back to Glastonbury, but I fear that for some that may have been enough. Thousands of people are employed every year to make the festival run smoothly, and as Mr Eavis pointed out, no-one could’ve predicted the weather, which is fair enough, but it would be nice to think that him and every other person in charge of travel arrangements on Monday will be helping to clear up all those tents that were abandoned in the fields and packaging them off the needy countries. It is a painful thing to say, but maybe, just maybe Glastonbury is becoming it bit to big for its own (Wellie) boots.