When I was a senior in high school, my friends and I saw our tutor at Leeds Festival, sunburned and drinking a pint of cider on the campsite. “Oh my God,” I remember us all cackling to each other, probably while applying neon face paint and deciding which hideous one-shoulder top to wear with our hideous three-quarter-length leggings. “Why’s she here? She’s so old!”
That was 2007. She was perhaps 27—in hindsight, a prime age to attend a festival. I know this because it is now 2023 and I am no longer a prime age. I have just got back from Glastonbury, aged 33, and I feel as old as the recently excavated remains of a medieval villager. Brush me off and put me in a museum, I’m ready to rest, please.
Of course, I know that Glastonbury is the kind of festival that people of all ages attend. I spent Sunday afternoon dancing to Blondie with my friends’ parents, all in their 60s and 70s, all doing jelly shots. Head to any of the acoustic stages at the festival and it’s hard to move for old lads in official Glastonbury T-shirts and felt hats. Thirty-three is not an outrageously advanced age at which to attend the event. But, for me—someone who last went to Glasto aged 28—doing the festival in my 30s did feel a lifetime away from doing it in my 20s.
In the run-up to the festival, when I first started thinking about this piece, I thought I knew what the difference would be. Embarrassingly, I assumed that simply being older would mean I’d transform into the kind of woman who travels with just a day trip-sized backpack of the North Face gear, eats açaí bowls as hangover food, and whose hair would stay in a perfectly tousled Sienna Miller wave until the festival’s end. I reckoned I’d have a more wholesome Glastonbury than those in my 20s, one where I’d, say, wake up at 8 a.m. to go to the on-site spa rather than find myself still sitting up at the Stone Circle come dawn. I watched the Instagram Stories of my friend Ju, who arrived there earlier than me and spent her Wednesday and Thursday doing salsa classes, seeking out the secret piano bar, and doing a soap-making workshop. I thought to myself: That will be me. I am a soap-maker now.
Somewhere between power walking to Argos to buy a £25 tent before it shut at 8 p..m on Thursday evening, and finding myself shoving party top after party top into a very old camping bag already full of travel-sized hair texturisers and sheet masks, I realized that this perhaps wasn’t how things were going to go.
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