Glastonbury 1998

It was 1998, 27 years after my only other visit to the Glastonbury Festival. I’d always wanted to go back to see if it was the magical mystical place that had stayed with me and influenced my life so much.

 

(There is an account of my experiences at Glastonbury 1971 – here)

 

I wrote this poem the night before I went back with my family in 1998.

where has it gone?

has it gone?

was it ever there?

was it ever?

or in my imagination?

the green barbarous fields

ripping the soles

barring the way

a divine consciousness shared

and left alone

in a wide green field

where the cows usually shit

and the grown-up children

roll in the mud

thinking it’s cool

and in-touch

but we now know

that illusion

of those times in our young days

in the blitz

or the warehouse

or the hedge

or the army

or a shared house in manchester

or especially in college

where we all were

at oxford and cambridge

especially in london

where the people sit

in shiny metal cans

and reach for the stars

by looking at their feet

with dear daps

slip slop along the concrete arteries

to work

and earn

so that they can sleep on the damp green grass

and smoke the dry brownish stuff

so now

moving back

in body

to almost certain disappointment

to find the egg of enlightenment

fried on a bun

with a neatly round slice of bacon

from a pig’s back

on your head

you continue to choose

the easy life

of taste and feeling

ingesting a thousand screams

on toast

for breakfast

mastitis on toast for lunch

bovine growth hormone soup for supper

served with a slice of horse

So that was written Tuesday night, something past nine, June the twenty-third nineteen ninety eight.

 

A stream of consciousness? How does it go then? Before my inner eye – not the spiritual one – but the eye of memory and imagination, I see what is and what was, what will be and what was really not. I can remember the times that didn’t happen and I can foretell the future that will never be. Going back to glastonbury tomorrow or maybe very early the day after. What will be there? What won’t? what was? What wasn’t? What is? what isn’t.

 

Now it’s July the seventh, two thousand and fourteen nearly 11.30 pm.

 

So, how was it actually in 1998? How did it differ from the first time in 1971?

 

There’s no big revelation. The Glastonbury Festival in 1998 was a big pile of crap. Cramped, overcrowded, drunken, dangerous, muddy, flooded, frightening, sickening – a festival of consumption and hedonism fuelled by corporations and greedy stallholders.

 

We arrived on the Wednesday night, struggled through all that crap for two days and escaped before the festival proper started on Friday.

Lesson learned I suppose – you can’t go back – it’s not there.

 

Anyway – Click here to read about the more interesting trip to Glastonbury Festival in 1971