Summer Festivals At first glance, England seems a poor place for summer festivals. Rainfall figures vary little from month to month in a country surrounded by windy oceans. It is impossible to say more than a week in advance whether you need T-shirts and shorts or woolly overcoats, sunglasses or umbrellas, for a given weekend. In fact, the worse the weather, the more we enjoy it. Last year, the heavens opened: Glastonbury Pop Festival was held amid the wettest June for 136 years. Next month, thousands of photo-processing laboratories must have thought their equipment had broken down: they saw roll after roll of prints coloured only in brown and grey. In fact, the 'Mud Festival' was one of the most enjoyable ever, because it was so memorable. Some people suffered E coli food poisoning: in the swampy conditions, cow-dung, mud, lunch, and people, became indistinguishable. Newspapers carried jubilant headlines about E coli's appearance. It proved how special the festival was. Some people who glanced at the headlines must have thought E coli was a new Britpop group. There are many rock festivals through the summer. Reading, at the end of August, has a reputation as the best for music. It is popular with students, who spend three days talking, drinking, smoking, and listening to cutting-edge music. Exactly the same as they do during term time, in fact, except that they pay £75 to do so. V98, near the end of August in Leeds and Chelmsford, also has a reputation for new and independent bands; July sees the T in the Park Festival on a Scottish farm; while the Phoenix Festival, scheduled for mid-July, was cancelled. (Perhaps it was sponsored by one of the newly privatised railway companies.) But Glastonbury is special. Run by a Somerset farmer, it is more of a general arts festival. It has families, friendly old hippies who went to the first mudfest there in 1970, an alternative atmosphere, and a wide range of music. (This year for example young, up-and-coming acts such as Bob Dylan and Tony Bennett feature next to Blur and Pulp.) Thousands of people head towards the fields of Worthy Farm, deep in the rural, south-west, and enjoy traditional English pastimes such as sitting in traffic jams, trying to find a park, pitching their tent in a puddle, and suspecting that the cannabis resin they have just paid ten pounds for is in fact a beef stock cube. (Not necessarily bad news. If the weather turns cold, they can then make a nice steaming cup of beef stock to drink.) Glastonbury is the focus for many aspects of the English personality often overlooked by foreigners. We are generally an indoor and private people, it's true; we like to joke about authority but generally abide by its rules; and we don't have much time for spiritual matters. But at Glastonbury, our other selves can come out. We spend the days wandering in the lovely sunshine, or the mud, talking happily to strangers. Anything goes in the fields of Worthy Farm as long as it doesn't harm anyone, and as long as there are plenty of beef stock cubes. But - most unusual of all - we rediscover our spirituality. Few of us believe in God any more, and when we do go to church, it's for the most important stages of life: our christening, wedding, funeral, or to buy a lawnmower (some churches have been deconsecrated and turned into garden centres). Hymns all sound the same to us, like other countries' national anthems. (In fact, we often can't tell hymn tunes from national anthems.) Formal religion, in short, does not appeal to us. It is much easier to look to our Celtic past. Look around Glastonbury and you will see hundreds of stalls selling books on Celtic mythology and paganism. Others sell crystals supposed to hold some sort of 'life force'. Everywhere people are talking about ley-lines - supposed lines of force hundreds of miles long linking sites of pagan significance. Celtic designs are visible everywhere: on books, on people's clothes, and - if the sun shines - on people's bodies in the form of tattoos. Some academics believe that most of this is based on legend and myth. There never was a Celtic culture, only a loose collection of ancient tribes throughout Europe who happened to share related languages. (Talking to some of the friendly old hippies at Glastonbury, you might think they are talking a language unrelated to English, with their talk of 'auras', 'rebirthing', 'cosmic balance, 'earth-energy' and so on.) But the new paganism appeals to us because it is so ill-defined, so lacking in any proper theory, that we can each model our own version. You want to believe in reincarnation? No problem. One life only? That's OK. Vegetarian? All part of the deal. Meat-eater? Hey, that's fine. Everybody's happy and in tune with each other's auras, with the earth, with cosmic balance and life-force, and with beef stock cubes. Glastonbury is the centre of all this because of the Tor, a thousand-year-old church on a hill surrounded by plains. During floods the Tor becomes an island - said to be the mythical Celtic Isle of Avalon. A thorn tree is said to be descended from the one Joseph of Aramathea brought when he transported the Holy Grail to Britain in Biblical times. Ley-lines are said to converge on the town. Not far away is Stonehenge, where each solstice, druids act out an ancient ceremony of cosmic significance. Well, not real druids. They are actually accountants, computer programmers and so on, but take spiritual refuge from balance sheets and financial software in the stones on Salisbury Plain. In 1998 the police let an invited audience of druids, pagans and mystics perform their ceremony inside the stone circle but kept other members of the public outside the four-mile exclusion zone. For the previous nine years noone had been allowed in at all for the solstice, except a crowd of journalists hoping to find hippies who had broken the cordon. So if you saw the bands from Glastonbury on the television and they all sounded the same to you, don't worry. Glastonbury is the open-air church of paganism, where we can all embrace our spiritual side once a year. And the music is our hymns. And, as we've said, hymns are all supposed to sound the same.

Going Native main index