The best summer of my life: a festival date that never ended | 365 days of summer
I fell in love at Glastonbury, of all places, with a singer in a band. It sounds like a scenario you’d find on a long-forgotten Britpop B-side but, reader, it happened to me.
In the run-up to that long weekend it had been a bleach-bright, balmy June. There’s always a certain amount of optimism that goes into packing for a festival like Glastonbury but, for once, it seemed like a solid bet. I chucked T-shirts, shorts and a bottle of factor 50 into my bag and got my sunglasses out. Summer had arrived.
But the sky flipped to grey the morning we set off. The gods of Somerset had decreed that this year’s festival would be a muddy one, and on site it was the kind of weather that turned on a breeze: scorching sun one minute, soaking rain the next. We had met before at another far-flung festival and both wanted to know each other better, but never seemed to be in the same place at the same time. I had never been on a date at a festival before but, somehow, at Glastonbury, which becomes a sprawling city of its own every year, it didn’t feel so strange.
She’d been playing a secret show in a tiny tent and I went to meet her afterwards; I hadn’t been able to get anywhere near the stage, so I had just listened, outside, and waited. We said hello shyly and then walked without knowing where we were going, in a sliver of sunshine, on and on, for miles, to fields neither of us had yet discovered, full of dancers and colours and music. The sky turned again, and suddenly we were soaked through. She covered our heads with her jacket as we ran; she still has that jacket, and it’s still useless in the rain.
Dates have an end point, but this one wouldn’t let go, and on it went, over the days. We explored together, uncovering new corners. We danced to an army of drag queens vogueing through dusky pink lights in a tent after dark. We wandered around aimlessly, dropping in on bands we never planned to see.
She held my hand firmly after a tentative conversation about whether hand-holding was a thing we’d do, while my hero Dolly Parton played a miniature diamante saxophone. Parton performed a song she had written especially for this audience, and got 100,000 people to sing Jolene, the world’s most deceptively difficult karaoke song. Swaying to Islands in the Stream while flushed with the terrifying thrill of meeting someone you suspect might be a keeper is an assault on the senses indeed.
From then on the summer was supercharged. We walked and walked through parks we knew and parks we didn’t and marvelled at the wildness that can be found in London when you truly look for it. There is nothing quite like a conversation about whether you’re seeing each other or seeing each other as the late sun sets over the postcard beauty of unexpected wildflowers and marshland.
I went to more festivals and shows that summer than I had since I was a rookie music journalist. The secret gig high up on a rooftop overlooking the city. Ibiza, where we saw a trapeze artist at a superclub do extraordinary things with a laser. Budapest, where we watched Hungary’s biggest hip-hop group â€" a gloriously bizarre gang, all dressed in suits â€" in slack-jawed amazement. We were in constant motion, moving always, and that summer set the tone for everything that would follow. The date never ended, and still we’re uncovering new corners.
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