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.
There’s something about Glastonbury that fuels an idiot sense that you can do anything you want, sans any real consequences, even if, like me, you’ve not been on a night out that lasted past 3 a.m. since before the pandemic. As one pal who convinced me to go on a very rickety and surprisingly fast-paced ferris wheel in Shangri-La at 5 a.m. on Saturday morning, said: “It’s a place where you just need to say yes to everything.” It means the reality of doing Glastonbury in your 30s versus your 20s isn’t that you automatically become very sensible. (If anything, it’s my more generally sensible pals who are still going hard at the festival as they hit 40.) It is that every silly decision comes at a cost. And that cost is pain.
It turns out that if you do 40,000 steps every day for a weekend, and you’re heading towards middle age, your body crumbles in the same way it might if you were to do a marathon. The consequences are immediate: lower back ache, a weird burning in the soles of your feet, heartburn, an unshakable tiredness. And so Glastonbury in your 30s involves planning for idiot decisions: choosing walking boots rather than fashion sneakers if you’re going to spend the night roaming the site like a robot vacuum cleaner, investing in a premium rucksack so you can chaotically overpack with better back support, using the pre-festival WhatsApp group to crowdsource information on the best lavender sleep sprays on the market and the best time to leave in order to beat the traffic.
Are the old lads in their felt hats struggling with this? It’s something I thought a lot about while I cursed myself for not bringing heat patches to alleviate my sore soles. Perhaps as you settle into doing Glastonbury as someone beyond the age of 29, you learn your limitations? Or maybe my festival experience is a sign of that very millennial affliction of behaving younger than I am finally catching up with me? Either way, I felt the pain and did dumb things anyway, and I’ll be going back next year to do the same. Except, this time, with fewer party tops and more painkillers.