Glastonbury Festival: Here's mud in your eye... NOT! Photograph: Kate Davison/AP
I realise it's virtually heretical in this Glastonbury-obsessed era, I know the facilities aren't quite as antediluvian as they used to be, and I accept that you get to watch more bands in one weekend than you could probably squeeze into a year, but still I can't help worrying that festivals are a strange thing to want to "do", especially if you're as time- and cash-impoverished as me. (My fault, I guess, for having so many ex-wives and children, but hey, or rather Hay, that's another rant.)
There was a time when rock festivals made sense - and that was the late-1960s. This was when there was still something more than vaguely resembling a rock community, and the notion that a mass of like-minded individuals could stand/sit/sleep/get stoned together in a field while the most cutting-edge groups of the day played music onstage imbued with the radical spirit of the period (give or take the odd Richie Havens or Joe Cocker) was little short of revolutionary.
The illusion of rebellion continues to cling to music festivals like, well, mud to saggy jeans. For someone like me who's allergic to fun of any kind, there's something faintly disturbing about people who choose to camp in a giant ditch for kicks. But what really makes me gag is when these same people give their thrill-seeking a patina of naughtiness, banging on about how many drugs they took or how late they went to bed, like they're living in some X-rated version of Enid Blyton-land, only for "lashings of ginger beer" read "crack, smack, black and Jack". So you spent Friday night semi-conscious in a marsh? Congratulations, you are officially a twat. I mean, how can going to a festival be a sign of your outsider status if 97 percent of the population has been to one?
And don't even get me started on the way music at festivals is reduced to a sort of pastoral production-line, band after band coming and going with inebriated intent, pathetically attempting to involve the crowd like a bunch of performing seals. Haven't they heard? A pleasure shared is a pleasure dissolved.
Besides, why bother? It's the 21st century! Don't know about you, but at home I've got an iPod, a Wii, a Mac and a wall-mounted HD 42-inch TV (and that's just in the loo) - my life is a series of brutally fast-cut Ballardian blipverts. Compared to this private technoid paradise, rock festivals are too slow, too long, and my idea of hell.
· Not so cynical? Visit Guardian Unlimited Music's Glastonbury and music festival special reports for all the latest on these non-outdated ways to have fun.
