Maybe it's my age. Correction it is my age. Well, whatever the reason, I'm not sure I get the whole music festival thing.

I've gone 31 years without darkening the door of Glastonbury, Reading or Creamfields so maybe I shouldn't rush to judgement, but it seems to me that the deal is that you pay the best part of a hundred quid to sit on a piece of cardboard in a field with 60,000 other soap dodgers and watch a band you can't see with the naked eye on a big TV screen.

It's like sitting at home with MTV on, only not as much fun because you can't get up and take a pee when you want because there are mile-long queues for the unspeakable portaloos. That would explain why most people don't bother with such bourgeois inventions as toilets and choose instead to piss up against the fence, thereby infusing the site with an aroma not unlike a tramp's Y-fronts.

Add discarded beer mugs and fast food cartons up to your ankles, thousands of people off their faces at two o'clock in the afternoon and security staff that represent the missing link between homo habilis and modern man and there you have it -- the authentic "festival vibe."

Still, the skateboarding was cool.

Picture: V Festival
Picture: MAG stall at the V Festival

BBC News Online: Crowds flock to V Festival