Glastonbury; the style and my rampant imagination.

Love at The Greenpeace Stage, sibling silence at Pyramid, cowboys and cowgirls in the Avalon bar, spick and span divorcees in a bell tent.

So, I went to Glastonbury again. In the lead-up there's rigorous planning. Curious jittery nerves (it is just a field in Somerset, after all), the scheduling of bands I love, the journey, the pressing need for paracetamol, hand sanitiser and packs of tissues. The year-long sense of anticipation. Then… you arrive. It is an assault on the senses. So many humans. So much to see. My imagination runs wild with what everyone's story might be. It is something to do with being in such close proximity to so many others. Finding that you are, in fact, part of a tribe.

So my partner and I are relaxed, drink in hand. A young couple stand in front of us in the crowd. I imagine her to have a name like Rhiannon and she hasn't been home to see her family for some time. Is her mother worried? She is in her very early twenties and has one of those wolf-cut hair styles with punishing layers and a choppy fringe, but it works. Her boyfriend, with whom she is clearly deeply in love (and he her) has a pink mohican and I consider he has one of those names that bears no resemblance to anything else, like 'Spud' or 'Achilles'. The tattoos are mind-blowing. As an aside, Glastonbury generally makes me question my two tattoos. It seems every single person there has one and the truth of the matter is: they do not always stand up well on close inspection. Is it rarer (cooler?) to have no tattoos than a ubiquitous one? But back to Spud and Rhiannon. We are at a small, intimate set on 'The Greenpeace Stage', one which is not televised but looking across the crowd we see a famous broadcaster with her grown-up kids. The sun is setting and there is love in the air. The couple sway in front of us; there are tears as the music plays. She hangs on to him and looks wan, as if she has had too much sun and he shades her with a gauzy shawl that looks like it might have come from Morocco. They are glued to each other but at one point he leaves to get a drink of cider and she cranes after him, waiting for his return. To leave in a Glastonbury crowd is high-risk, you might not find your way back.

Later, we are waiting at the Pyramid stage in blistering heat expectant of the next act. I think (again) I should have invested in a parasol and feel envy at the shade that a couple nearby gain from one. Two girls are in front of us and I have not heard them converse with each other once; they've either had a disagreement or they don't know each other well. There are many things that could have happened the night before to have precipitated this. They are wearing soft, floaty dresses, hats and they might be named Isabella and Pru. On second thought, they could even be sisters and that is why there is silence between them; companionable silence is a skill that siblings master over a lifetime. One leaves the spot they hold in the crowd and the other does not even register.

We stop at a bar. It's a favourite place on the site called 'The Field of Avalon' and the bar features servers dressed as medieval wenches wearing milkmaid dresses. This seems completely normal and a girl with a stud through her cheek and a ring in her nose serves us. Her breasts are jutting up (no bra). We find some shade (no parasol). There are people lying on the ground all around us. Many of them are asleep, even as the next band starts up with a pulsing drum beat. Again, this area is not televised and does not have the standard panning drone sweep that is so often associated with filmed coverage. There are a couple of cowgirls whose outfits have a high polyester content and they tip their hats to the cowboys in the bar. The cowboys regard the cowgirls and there is sexual tension. It would be fair to say that there is sexual tension much of the time in Glastonbury as the place is an absolute convergence - a smashing together of the genders - and anything goes. There is a darkish underbelly to Glastonbury's sexual life, which I presume takes place in tents or dark corners, in closeness to others and without having had a shower for days. No one minds.

There are a group of twenty-something friends, one of whom is wearing a jaunty red beret. The girls have perfectly tousled hair and impeccable posture. The boys look like my son. Their theme is red. Another group have a theme of animal print; more man-made fibres and a lot of leopard. A boy of about my daughter's age and I start chatting and he tells me its his first Glastonbury. A Glasto virgin. I ask what he makes of it. He says they went too hard the first day. They took some mushrooms, he said, and people's faces started melting. I imagine he considers this pitstop with me as being a bit like calling his mum. I dispense some gentle wisdom and tell him to make sure he stays hydrated. His group all smile benignly and the ones on the periphery wonder whether he and I know each other. We don't. No one does, but that's what is nice. They go on their way.

We make our way to another stage which is an intrepid thirty-minute walk across the baking, wood-chip floored routes that are marked out with hand-painted signage. There is a specific Glastonbury font for these. On the way we pass - despite the sweltering heat - a couple dressed as 'Bananas in Pyjamas' complete with striped nightwear and banana hats. The fabrics gleam in the sunshine. One has a rucksack on and I wonder what's inside it. Provisions for a long day at a festival in fancy dress. Where are the other bananas? This doesn't seem like an endeavour just for two, I imagine a whole cohort of them. The WhatsApp group lighting up with;

'I got a new banana hat!'

Probably from a specialist Etsy seller.

On my phone, I skim-read an article written by a mainstream broadsheet newspaper journalist that makes the point that the 'yurt and helicopter' folk are ruining it for everyone. Back in my glamping site, the bell tent opposite us houses a group of middle-aged ladies who, I decide, are a divorced women’s group seeking out bold, later-life experiences. They greet each other with smiles every morning and their tent is adorned with lights and bunting; they have, one could say, gone to town. They sit outside drinking champagne at 9am as they get ready to enter the festival for the day and have flower garlands in their hair and dab glitter eyeshadow on each other's faces. One says she forgot to bring nude underwear and has a white dress to wear. Oh no they say. As if having visible pants is a show-stopper. There is a beauty 'hot-seat' in which all of the women take a turn. Compliments abound. It is girlhood, but older. Women bringing on women, holding them up, supporting them. When we return at night their tent is aglow but they are tucked up by 11pm, most likely with ear plugs in to drown out the pounding din that persists until the morning. There are then a few hours of quiet - so much so that birds can be heard despite the field hosting over two hundred thousand people - and then the music starts up again. These women, during the quiet hours, discuss their HRT regimes and whether they intend to let their hair go grey (it's 50/50 on this front) and in the morning silence, as I lay there, we are separated only by a canvas wall.

Conversely, at night we skirt around the edge of a mosh pit that resembles some version of Armageddon. There’s a sort of bouncing jabbing dance mainly performed by young men. The massive space is pulsating, raving in the darkness with a ceiling of strobe lasers above their heads. They are loving it. The abandon, the chaos and the roughness. I guess it beats turning up to your nine-to-five job on a Monday morning, it is an adult version of rough and tumble. It seems ludicrous to me in that instant that anyone cares about anything. That is perhaps what Glastonbury offers; sheer escapism. No one cares and everyone loves.

Around and about the festival, there are a baffling number of women wearing mesh or lace dresses with visible bra and pants. It would appear for this demographic, visible pants is not a show-stopper. They are, instead, the whole point. The raison d'etre of the outfit. A young woman, flushed and wearing a head-dress of some description stops to search her bag, I assume, for a cigarette. She pauses. The heat is causing waves. If you Google 'style at Glastonbury' you will find images of Kate Moss and Alexa Chung in the mud, back in the day. One year (2016) I experienced the mud and found it to be an entirely different conundrum. The recent years of heat have rendered shade to be the ultimate commodity. There are sunburned shoulders everywhere. If I were to define Glastonbury style I would say it is formulaic but subtly different each time. One year woodland nymph, one year space cadet, one year artsy school teacher, circa 1982. It is the ultimate in terms of contradiction. The conditions call for technical camping gear, the frisson of encounter between the young calls for barely wearing clothes at all. Somewhere in between style finds itself. The men look like they are going to the supermarket for BBQ supplies; standard shorts and a t-shirt. There is the need for function and fashion. There are some people so achingly cool that they surprise you. A girl pops up in my peripheral vision wearing a cream, vintage, silk lace-edged romper suit that looks like it came from the Seventies, with stomping black boots and a loose pony tail. It makes you feel that you have missed the mark. But that is so not the point. It's a place where youth and beauty are everywhere but in an undone, nonchalant way.

I wonder if the broadsheet journalist also considers that the musicians, who can be heard arriving by helicopter to warm up for their evening headline set, are also ruining it for everyone else. Whether he objects to them as they stay in streamlined airstream caravans (with A/C), cordoned off from the masses in the VIP area. By the by, I think. The VIP area, which I have managed to gatecrash once or twice without the requisite wristband, features a glitterati of influencers and celebrities who are clad - obscurely and in thirty-degree heat - in welly boots and Barbour jackets. There is always a lingering PR person who is managing this sartorial 'content' and it is pumped out on to the internet, although it bears little resemblance to the actual festival vibe. Then, other people (read; older and on the corporate dollar) and some beautiful young people sit down for a meal in the only 'restaurant' on site which has tables and chairs, knives and forks. The toilets have mirrors and actual porcelain toilet seats. The height of luxe and one could almost forget where one is.

Meanwhile, what do others see when they see me? They see a woman who is clearly in her fifties, wearing a long black linen dress. Black because the long-drop toilets are unforgiving to pale fabrics and there is a lot of sitting on the ground. A printed cotton scarf is round my neck to protect me from the sun, and I turn it, depending on which way I am facing and whether I want my shoulders or my chest covered. I learned this at last year's Glastonbury, to have a cape with me. I am smiling most of the time and I tuck into a salty meal served in a cardboard tray, which I devour with a wooden fork. None of this requires any cooking or cleaning up. The freedom that it affords is heady; no schedule, no children, no home, no dog, no pretence, no need to go anywhere or do anything other than listen and watch. We find we have some of our deepest conversations here. It somehow lends itself, despite the mayhem, to openness and kindness. So we walk and we talk, watching and listening as it all swirls around us.

I have written about Glastonbury before here and here and here.

Photos take surreptitiously by me.