Glastonbury girl

'What happened to surrealism?' Lucy finds herself wondering a lot these days. 'Who suddenly decided that it wasn't cool any more, and why?' She misses those joyfully random days of the mid-Nineties, when Vic Reeves wasn't a sad old reality TV contestant, when it was perfectly acceptable to go out with someone on the basis that you both thought Ned's Atomic Dustbin was a great band name and that the 'How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?' joke (answer: 'hairshit sprinkle witch') was the funniest thing ever. One of the great things about Glastonbury is that all that stuff no longer seems so out of date. Suddenly, she is no longer the owner of the last remaining Curve T-shirt in the known universe.

She was born to breathe the Avalon air. Once through those gates with her new photo ID card proudly displaying her sensible bob, the transformation will begin: no longer will she be the hard-working, obsessively neat girl whose love life resembles a misinterpreted Camille Paglia essay. As she puts up her tent and unpacks her vodka from her Sean the Sheep rucksack, Susie and Gemma will take bets on what will happen first: the inevitable snog with an ageing Levellers fan, or the near-fatal fall into the edge of the campfire while trying to recreate Vic and Bob's 'chaffing' routine.

Lucy used to call it 'Glasto'. She now realises that was stupid, pretentious and childish, so calls it 'Glasters' instead. She still rhapsodises about the old days - that Saturday in 1995, when the entire eastern campsite erupted into cries of 'Bollocks!' for an hour from 3am, only to be punctuated by one lone dissenting voice quoting from a Monty Python film. Genius! Feelings of belonging don't come much stronger. Earlier in the night, Jarvis Cocker had unveiled a new song called 'Disco 2000', and she'd wondered what she would be doing at this time, five years on. The answer was that she'd be in the Healing Field, French kissing Gemma in a legendary three-day experiment with lesbianism.

Lucy moans about the new, 'tame' Glastonbury; secretly, however, she quite likes it. She can pass out happily in the Sacred Space after seven pints of cider before being dragged back to the tent by Susie and Gemma. When she hears suspicious noises from the tent next door, she will say, a little louder than is called for: 'Are those two shagging?'. The next morning, she will be bubbly about the prospect of seeing Jools Holland, Brian Wilson and 17 other acts she would normally rather sell her Adidas old school trainers than admit to liking. Gemma stares at her and tries to see the clerical worker beneath the pigtails. 'But I thought you hated the Beach Boys, Luce,' she says. Lucy, bewildered, adjusts the novelty hat she bought the previous day. 'Yeah, but Gem - it's Glasters, isn't it?'