It’s taken me several days to wring the last of the mud from my hair, but I think I have finally recovered from the Glastonbury Festival. I’ve scraped the butterfly tattoos from my cheeks and changed my socks, but now that I’ve escaped from the horror of the all-enveloping brown sludge I can feel the same old rose-tinted veil beginning to descend over my memories. Like Shakespeare and swimming in the North Sea, a muddy Glastonbury is one of those experiences that is infinitely better in retrospect than reality.
It’s not really the music that makes Glastonbury my favourite time of year, and neither is it the British summer. My father calls it Glastonbury spirit, my friends call it hippy-ish-ness, but by any name it’s the friendly vibe that really makes Glasto special.
For one weekend a year we all come together to feel superior to the Establishment and eat rain-sodden veggie burgers. The sense of community this brings, along with the spiritual high of absorbing some hippy values, makes everyone smiley. Even people who spend the whole weekend swearing at, and losing wellies in, the mud come home feeling uplifted. It’s easier to be optimistic when faced with so much of the good in human nature.
My generation, the teens of the Noughties, actually have a lot more in common with those original hippies than most of the people in between. We have been forced by environmental change to understand the impact that we are having on the world and as a result, despite our reputation as apathetic and materialistic, we are determined to make a difference. Fair enough, any individual difference would be about enough to save one ice cube from getting a little slippery, but combined we make a force to be reckoned with.
Like the hippies, and unlike the punks, we are idealistic. Puberty makes everyone think they will change the world, but we are different because our world desperately needs changing. No generation since the hippies has had something as cataclysmic to fight. Cynicism will get you only so far; a dry sense of humour won’t stop your fingers going wrinkly when your continent’s submerged. The hippies’ cause was personal freedom and ours is CO , but we’re all trying for a better world.
So we try to emulate the original green-livers. Whether they were growing their own radishes in self-sufficiency communes or simply eating organic tofu, hippies really cared about the impact they had on the natural world. Glastonbury, with its wind turbines and solar-powered showers, reflects the same ideas even now. Perhaps we London teenagers wouldn’t go so far as to touch soil outside a music festival, but we do our best with the school fair-trade chocolate stalls and charity bake sales.
We turn off the lights in our classrooms when the sun’s out (about once a year), and we recycle paper. What’s more, we try our best for charities that do not even affect our own futures. OK, some of the shallower 15- year-olds among us throw themselves into any campaign Bob Geldof shows the slightest interest in, but the majority help because they feel they ought, not because they think it looks cool. The hippies believed in much the same thing – free love wasn’t only orgies, it was also about loving one another, no matter how far away or how different.
Glastonbury began life as a gathering of hippies and has now become simply a gathering of happy people, but it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference. It is impossible to come to the festival and not feel cheerful, although whether this is due to the attitudes of the revellers, or the general fug of mind-altering fumes, is debatable. Whatever the cause, Glastonbury remains one of the few outposts of those hippy ideals that so inspired people 40 or so years ago.
People act differently at Glastonbury than they do anywhere else. Nobody is judged by their clothes or mudstains because everyone looks as foul and crazy as everyone else. It was only when I was walking home through London in my eclectic festival clothes, soiled wellies, brightly coloured body art, mud-plated jeans and matted dreads that I realised how nonjudgmental Glastonbury had been. When people barge into me on the Tube I scowl at them; when I’m jostled in front of the Pyramid stage I just smile. We are friendly at Glastonbury because everyone else is, or we expect everyone else to be. The whole weekend becomes one long positive cycle. But why is it positive, when most other behavioural cycles in the world are negative?
Glastonbury’s ethos is rooted in the hippies who began it. The festival’s past is entrenched in peace and love, and this spirit has endured even now that the majority of attendees are there for other reasons. People come to the festival every year with the preconception that everyone else there will be nice, and so they instinctively side with each other. And because they assume the best of one another, they are generally proved right.
This is the legacy of the hippies, and it goes to show what would be possible if humans weren’t inherently pessimistic. We teens will probably grow out of our childish naivety and optimistic ambitions, but I pray it doesn’t happen too soon.
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