Glasto Diary '25: sneaking in, staying up to the sunrise & waking up in Vogue

Hot sweaty heathens in heaven.

There’s nothing quite like Glastonbury. Growing up, I don’t remember when the festival started seeping into my cultural consciousness, but I know that going to Glastonbury was something I aspired to from an early age, alongside getting my Hogwarts letter and becoming a princess. I first fell in love with music in my infancy. One of my earliest memories is sitting on my mother’s bedroom floor listening to Now 44 and learning every word to every song. Looking at the track list now… it adds up. Being from the West Country, growing up in the era of Top of The Pops and Britpop, absolutely loving music…. It’s still a fantasy place now.

It’s three weeks before Glastonbury. Myself, my boyfriend and my best friend are sitting around a table at 392, feverishly discussing an anti-Glasto plan involving a trip to Lanzarote with sun and camper vans. There’s the same stories I tell myself every year, because every year I never get a real ticket in the ticket lottery - “I’ll feel like shit for a week after”, “It’s not like I won’t see those musicians somewhere else”… But then we find out one of our best friends Mina is playing. She’s never been to Glasto. She’s an iconic icon DJ. We all three look at each other and make a pact. It’s time to get to Glastonbury.

One of us has a real ticket. The other finds a friend playing who is happy to give them their ticket when they leave on Thursday, after their set. I was the only one left to conjure a solution. One thing about Glastonbury is that getting a ticket is like gold dust. Luckily for me, I have a tattoo saying “Lucky” on my foot, and I’m very lucky. The luckiest girl in the world, some might say.

Getting the last train down from London on Friday night with a tote bag containing the bare essentials (multiple tiny dance floor outfits, Isamaya Industrial 2.0 palette, signature black fan, chewing gum, M&S emergency sandwich, film camera, vintage riding boots) we were surrounded by Scousers discussing how they were going to break in. Every year, approximately 20,000 people break into Glastonbury; it’s a true testament to the pilgrimage that will be made to be there. Huddled over hand drawn maps or iPhones with WhatsApp chats pulled up on the screen, my new friends shared the latest updates on where the watch towers were, the location of dog patrols, and which walls were the easiest to scramble up and down.

I did sneak in but I didn't break in. Bare essentials for me definitely couldn’t make it into a format compact enough to jump a wall. However, I have snuck into Glastonbury every time I’ve been. My tactic this year was another classic - the pass back - whereby you find someone who looks enough like you and is kind enough to let another person bring you out their ticket, wristband and ID for you to enter when they’re already inside.

Glastonbury is a mystical place and this year it welcomed my sorcery with open arms. After some compliments on how good the shaved head looked compared to my (clearly not me) ID photo of long hair, I was let in without a single issue and entered the best weekend of my life.

Every time I go, I tell myself I’ll document the indescribably awe-inspiring cacophony that is Glastonbury. I took my journal with me the last time I went, for fucks sake. I recorded voice memos each morning stumbling back to my tent, trying to patch together some verbal semblance of the total ecstatic euphoria of the day and night I’d just experienced. This time, I decided to challenge my deeply sentimental self and trust in a hope, a dream, and a few rolls of 35mm film.

If I can sum up the weekend in a few sentences? The most magical place in the world. Everyone got a Glasto tan. Free Palestine. Your from the 70s but I’m a 90s bitch. The Prodigy. OLIVIA FUCKING ROCKSTAR RODRIGO. NYC Downlow is the best club in the world. Love is everything. Thank you Glasto.

Oh, and waking up after sleeping for 22 hours from Monday 12pm to Tuesday midday and being sent a photo of me and Alasdair from 6am outside Maceos on Vogue? Iconic. And my scent of the weekend? Heathens, Cowboys & Santa Ana Winds from Discothéque.