My younger son, Harry, and I haven’t missed a Glastonbury since 1993 when he was five years old. Sometimes one or other or both have thought we wouldn’t or couldn’t go – absence of funds, other commitments, missing the ticket boat, reluctance to face the mud-bath, thinking you’re too old (me), being in Cuba (him) – but somehow we always end up finding a way and getting there. This year is no exception.

Ginny and Harry at Glastonbury

Nowadays my son gives me tips on what music to look out for and we meet up sometimes to watch a band. In his teenage years I’d catch a glimpse of him (face-painted, mud-spattered) across a crowded field but in the early days we were exploring and finding our Glastonbury selves.

The first of the mud years that we experienced Harry and his friend spent two days in the tent, drawing lizards. Whenever there was a break in the downpour they’d be escorted out to the Lizard shop – a stall along the main drag in the circus field selling stuffed lizards of all shapes and descriptions – where another purchase would be made. The new acquisition would then be carefully drawn and coloured in. They were miniature zoologists of the stuffed reptile world and took the business of cataloguing their charges seriously. Outside the tent haven the muddy festival roared.

Glasto lizards!

Over the nineties our ambit expanded to include all the fields at our end of the festival; circus, cabaret, kids, green, acoustic. Mud could always shrink it back down though. I only ventured as far as the main stage in 1998 when Bob Dylan played, a speck on the Pyramid stage across a vast swamp ocean. The circus tent was our top venue for a while. Harry was in there every day during the 1995 festival, right up the front watching act after act. One day I went to collect him and found the crowd cheering and chanting his name. There was my boy, aged seven, swaying in his stinky socks on the shoulders of a unicyclist, playing to a packed circus tent. That was his Glastonbury stage debut. One year there was a huge canvas, divided up into jigsaw shapes. On my segment I painted a woman in a red dress dancing on a hilltop. Harry painted a lizard.

A mud year at the festival

1999: a dense and sweaty year when anarchy reigned. More people climbed or burrowed in than paid for a ticket, there were tents in the trees and the ditches and the air was thick with the smoke from ten thousand camp fires. Toilets overflowing, rubbish and devastation everywhere, the place like a wild refugee camp and the infrastructure collapsing under the weight of punters. The next year was even more extreme. After that it nearly got closed down for good until it was re-born; different, bigger, more mainstream, less edgy but still, somehow, retaining its unique and quirky essence that amongst other things allows festival-goers access to an unfettered version of themselves. I think that’s what keeps pulling us back.

Glastonbury is like a magic city that materializes once a year (except for the fallow ones). The rest of the time it exists in some alternative dimension. Somewhere, in that in-between place, those images of us remain – the dancing woman in red, the lizard boy.
In 1999 we went by train. While we were waiting in line at Castle Cary station for a bus to take us to the site there was a sudden deluge. By the time we boarded we were soaked to the skin, shivering, all our gear drenched and dripping.
‘We must remember, Mum,’ he said.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Never to do this again.’ I didn’t know whether he meant the festival or the train or the rain or what. As we approached the festival gates the sun came out. Harry pulled his orange velvet jester’s hat that he’d bought the previous year from his bag and planted it on his head. The little bells jingled. We smiled. Of course, we’d do it again.

Here's hoping for some sunshine this year...

Ginny Baily’s debut novel, Africa Junction, is published by Harvill Secker and available now.