This wasn’t my experience, but if I don’t get a ticket next year, I might give it a try.

Just because you couldn’t get a ticket doesn’t mean you have to miss out on all the fun. Just follow my handy tips below, and with the help of a very obliging friend, you can be well on your way to recreating the Glastonbury experience in the comfort of your own home….

Duck out of work early on a Thursday, and then go and sit in your car for seven hours. Don’t go anywhere. Just sit there. If you have heating, even better: whack it up to full. When it gets dark and you’re nice and sweaty, go around to the back of your house and enter by vaulting over a hedge/climbing in the windows/shinning up the drainpipe. This will be your method of entry and exit to the house for the next four days. Arrange in advance to have a friend distribute your furniture, possessions and various random bits of taut string around the house in your absence.

Also, tell them to remove all your light bulbs. Upon entering your home, stumble around blindly for an hour or so before you find your bed. Insert four or five large rocks under your mattress. Take an aspirin. Wait for nothing to happen. Go to bed. Arrange for a friend to wake you up by pissing on your duvet. Eat a Mars bar for breakfast. Go and stand outside your toilet for an hour and a half. Use toilet (not paper) Arrange for your friend to stand at the bottom of the garden holding up a CD jewel case of a band you aren’t really that keen on. For true authenticity, arrange for another friend to stand directly in front of you and shout. Put the radio on very quietly. Keep this up for six or seven hours.

Queue up beside your kitchen cupboard for two hours. Pay £4.50 for an authentic Thai meal (pot noodle). Take an aspirin. Wait for nothing to happen. Arrange for your friend to accost you naked on the stairs and jabber wildly at you for an hour. Stand outside your toilet for an hour. Give up, go into the garden and pee under a bush.

Repeat steps 12-14. Throw £15 into your neighbour’s garden. Roll up some bay leaves and sage in a Rizla. Light. Choke. Repeat. Take an aspirin. Wait for nothing to happen. Go to bed. Discover that someone (possibly your obliging friend) has pissed on your bed.

Sleep fitfully while your friend plays bongos two feet from your head and shouts “Oi-OI!” every ten minutes. Repeat steps 8-15 Pay £8.20 for an authentic organic Mexican Veggie burger (8 Linda McCartney Spicy Bean burgers, 99p from Tesco). Take an aspirin. Wait for nothing to happen.

Become amazed when you actually do start to feel a tingle in your toes. Neck half a bottle of White Lightening Extra Fearsome Cider.

Find a puddle. Dance in it for twelve minutes, even though you can’t hear any music from where you are. Find a bush. Throw up in it. Repeat steps 19-23.

Watch your friend (or other random person) to twirl fireballs while wearing a silly jester’s hat and no shirt. Say “wow”. Repeat any of the above steps.

Go to bed.

Discover that someone (probably you) has thrown up on your bed. Sleep fitfully while your friend throws buckets of water at you, shouting “Glastonbuuuuuuuuuury!” every five minutes. Repeat steps 8-15.

Pay £6.40 for a plate of chips. Repeat steps 16-24. Go to bed. Discover that someone (probably your friend) has stolen your bed, your clothes, and, in fact, everything you own. Climb down the drainpipe and over the fence, and sleep in your car.

Wake up uncomfortably and then sit in your car for nine hours, with the heater on full blast.

Go directly to work.

See? Nothing to it! The authentic festival experience in the (dis)comfort of your own home.

Off to the Smoke again for business and cocktail and champagne pleasure. Oh, and of course, the return of the girls in Sex and the City! Back late Saturday. Might be back here on Sunday - depending on the strength of the cocktails!

You never really realise how often you go to the toilet, until you don’t have one! Working from home is not making this any easier.

My leg crossing is getting better - and thank goodness I have a pub five doors away.

Just to prove that being with someone isn’t easy, two celebrity “separations” this week, that won’t come as a surprise to anyone. Firstly, Liza and David called it a day. I only wish they’d said “ta ta” before the Ruby Wax interview that was shown last week. Liza looked liked she couldn’t stand him then, let alone when they were in private. He went to kiss her - mouth open, of course - and, well, let’s just say I was glad I wasn’t eating at the time. It could have been very unpleasant.

And then, today it was announced that Kym and Jack, you know the one who left HearSay and the young blonde lad from Eastenders were embarking on a trial separation after a year of marriage. Well, they didn’t announce it. Kym Marsh’s management company did. Why do you need your management company to announce your separation? Why announce it, anyway?

Whoever is involved, breaking up with your partner is never pleasant - although Liza must be kind of used to it by now. When you invite Elizabeth Taylor to your wedding, aren’t you kind of jinxing the whole thing before you even start? And, yet again, the tongue thing from that wax-work man! Just not good.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Breaking up is never pleasant. There are the rows, the tears, the silences, the slamming of doors and then one person leaves. Hopefully, it is a good thing, and you don’t plunge into the despair of “I can’t live without X”. If you do, it then all turns very nasty. If you don’t, it’s still not good, but you know somewhere it’s for the best.

Whichever way you look at it, breaking up is hard to do - although it does seem somewhat easier in the world of celebrity.

Bob Hope had links to the Gene Puddle. My great-aunts old home was once inhabited by the Hope’s. It had a blue plaque and everything.

Oh, well, 100 isn’t a bad age, I suppose.

Thanks to Andrew for linking to this over-18’s only Glastonbury page from his site.

I don’t know how I missed seeing it on the day!

The house is in chaos. Building work on the bathroom has commenced and as a result I now have no toilet (although I was assured this would not happen, under any circumstances!). Oh, joy!

I’m gutted. Just like his fish!

The Other Half is packing. He’s off to Open University Summer School in York. He’s insisted on driving, which is a concern to me - and to everyone else who knows how the Other Half drives. But there we go, he’s a big boy now.

It’s strange, the whole Summer School idea. It’s not a bit like “Shirley Valentine” in my experience. Being in the Social Policy Department, I have only had to do one week in Bath during my six years of courses. I had a wild time - up until the wee small hours drinking, smoking and being generally debauched. Oh, and the lectures, they weren’t bad either, from what I remember. And that’s the thing. Although the educational programme is full, to say the least, what I took away from it was more the social aspect. I really enjoyed meeting new people and living what I perceive to be a student like life (put up in the halls - as we were) for a week.

I did regress as well. All of a sudden, I did feel more like I was 18 than in my mid-twenties. With the bar set at general University prices, a round of shorts was just way too cheap. That’s what I blamed my hangovers on, anyway. But, if what you want to do is work whilst you are there, and work bloody hard, you can do that as well. There are extra lectures laid on, as well as optional discussion groups and tutorials. The one that really touched me was by a guy from the South-Coast, who had been involved in the buy out of Brighton FC. He gave a really interesting lecture on football hooliganism, which was much in the news at the time. He likened it to the last great bastion of the working man. It really was the first time that I thought about hooliganism in these terms. I’m not completely convinced he was right, but certainly he made many valid points, which were re-affirmed when I read Paul Heaton’s (The Housemartins/Beautiful South) autobiography.

So, anyway, the Other Half is off tomorrow for a week. The new boiler is in and working. The shower is having a very hard time coping. Luckily, work on the new bathroom starts on Monday, with all the bits and pieces presently sitting in one of the spare bedrooms. I’ve got meetings nearly all of next week with work - and am spending Thursday and Friday in London. This will be capped off by spending a very girlie night with this woman, celebrating the return of Sex and the City with many Cosmopolitans! I can’t wait.

Added to this, I have the double bed all to myself for a week. Bliss!

Someone please explain. Since when have Lemon Jelly’s music been described as “hip hop”? Methinks the BBC have it wrong - or am I listening to someone completely different?