There was a group on last night's line-up called Pandora's Jockstrap, and every summer solstice Michael Eavis, founding father of the Glastonbury Festival, half-expects the contents of something like that to drop on his head.
'Why do I keep organising it?' he asked, with one hand to his forehead. 'It was originally meant to be enjoyable. But I seem to have got involved in a treadmill of dependency.' He was talking just after a man knocked on his farmhouse door and said, jolly good festival, but a fire protection vehicle has just crunched my car where do I send the bill?
The address was, as usual, Worthy Farm, Pilton, where Mr Eavis had 75,000 people watching 1,000 rock, theatre, circus and green acts for the weekend.
A youth came calling about his girlfriend, who had been taken to hospital on Saturday after fainting in a demonstrative audience for the pop group The Killer. The boyfriend wanted to present Mike, his wife and their eight children, with a box of Quality Street for all the help. But it might have been the death he has dreaded in nearly 20 remarkable years of city-sized crowds in his backyard and pastures.
Thinking hurriedly, he cites three reasons for carrying on. CND gets £100,000 a year out of it. Although not all locals support the festival, Pilton village school has got a new classroom out of it. And nearby Whiteston's comprehensive school will get a community resource centre out of it.
But another reason emerges in his fondness for Tennyson's poem The Morte d'Arthur, which, friends say, he always insists should be quoted in pre-publicity leaflets. The lines begin: 'I am going... to the Isle of Avalon, where falls not hail nor rain/ Nor ever wind blows loudly.' Avalon, the poem says, is land of 'billowing hollows' like a summer sea.
'Yes,' a disgruntled circus group manager, after hearing the lines read yesterday, said: 'I am going to Avalon. But I am going incredibly slowly because of the mud.'
Even in yesterday evening's mist and rain, though, visitors to the festival's climax could still see a touch of this vision as they approached the real Vale of Avalon through valley upon valley of fields laid out with the grace of parkland, some of the richest pasture in Britain.
Yesterday showed that the event has also become one of Britain's most litter-free public gatherings, with green groups insisting on rubbish being marshalled into piles of plastic bags, to be collected from today onwards by 200 volunteers.
Mike Eavis is sceptical about the New Age metaphysical groups which had a high profile in this year's programme. 'Personally I believe in political action. I don't have much faith in Tarot cards.'
