The mud is up to our knees. Mud the colour of long-dead flesh, a gelatinous ooze that wants to slowly take you down to Hades.

Exhausted, there are times you want to surrender to its warm embrace for the alternative is being pounded by more globules of chilling rain disgorged from ruinous black clouds.

You can barely hear yourself think as the driving deluge batters your flapping waterproofs. Across the field shadowy outlines of hundreds of other humans stumble about seeking shelter.

In the distance a boom, boom, boom can be heard, sometime loud, sometimes muffled as it is buffeted by the raging wind.

Yeah, yeah I’ve been Glastonbury a few times and survived. It always rains when I go. Not just rains it monsoons.

This year I’m staying away but it was with a little smile yesterday that I saw the now traditional pictures of mile long queues and rivers of rain sweeping around wellie wearing festival goers.

How bright eyed and bushy tailed they looked marching off to the festival front. How hollow-eyed and haunted they will be on the inevitable long retreat from Worthy Farm. The flashbacks will last a long time. The world will seem a different

place for weeks.

But you know what. There isn’t another experience like it and I’m insanely jealous of that joyful army now encamped, cheek by jowl by hideous latrine, ready for action. Its enemy will be dull conformity, lazy thinking and comfort. And it

will win.

I’ve been taking the VW campervan to festivals for many years (this time its End Of The Road in Dorset) and there is something gloriously British about what we put ourselves through.

No other country goes to as many festivals as we do and many of those places have weather much more suited to the pursuit than we do.

Why is it that thousands of us eschew the Corfus and Costas for the indignities of a muddy field in the middle of nowhere.

I’ve had plenty of time to ponder this queuing for the disgusting loos or an overpriced pint and I think it’s about escaping the Man, disrupting the order of our increasingly regimented lives.

What better way to throw of this tyranny than to enter the parallel universe that is a four-day festival.

Different rules apply and time’s iron grip is thrown off.

It is for the most part an egalitarian world (although a pox on the increasing numbers of exclusive high-priced glamping and yurt sections) where the shop girl and the lawyer are indistinguishable under dodgy hats and floral shirts.

In short it is the child like pleasure of throwing off responsibility and discovering new sights, smells (for sure) people, ideas and of course sounds.

So when, like me, you look in your newspapers and your TV screens at those half drowned souls today don’t feel sorry for them. They’re having the time of their lives.

The Argus: Jordan Henderson 

So here we go again. I know we’re not out yet but didn’t you, like me want to throw your shoe at the TV, when England played the other night. The random and reckless team selection with players ending the match lined-up like a life sized

bagatelle board impotently failing to make a dent in the Slovakian defence.

The terrible TV commentary failing to tell us what we could all see: that England were going nowhere. And then having to listen to Ian Wright in the studio telling us the “boys did well” or some such guff.

But fear not. It will soon be over again for the Three Lions and we can get back to enjoying the tournament.