Top 10 Things to Take to a Music Festival

You cannot enter the festival without the ticket to get in. Keep that handy and safe. Put it somewhere that you can easily retrieve it from at the gate.

I've had my festivals where someone has had to practically unpack their whole rucksack, because they put the ticket in first and it's now right at the very bottom. 

In theory, if you took nothing else but your ticket to the festival, you could survive it. You'd be in through the gate and there are ways and means to sustain yourself therein. You could find a corner of a marquee to catch a couple of hours' sleep.

The big festivals invariably have religious areas. Representatives from all of the big faiths erect some kind of tent.  At Glastonbury, the Christians, Hare Krishnas and one other group (whose name escapes me) all provide a free meal per day. It's very basic fare and you have to sit through a service to eat it, but it's there.

Check out the possibilities at your own festival before you rely on this though. It could badly go wrong, if such sustenance isn't available.

For a start, you could use them for carrying your stuff into the festival. They are bags. Nowhere near as sturdy as a rucksack, but still bags. And if it's raining on the way in, you could cover your rucksack with them to keep your things dry.

This is fundamentally a highly flexible, waterproof sheet. Punch three holes in it and it's a raincoat. Wrap a couple around your feet and they are rain-boots. Place one on the floor and it's a dry patch upon which to sit.

Place one at the entrance to your tent (particularly during a Mudfest) and it's somewhere to take off your boots.  Drape your belongings in them to keep the mud out of your clean things. Put your muddy things inside them. Mud damage limitation for the win.

My mind flits back to that Glastonbury when a friend arrived with a 'bargain'. It was a very, very cheap tent. Our dubious expressions were vindicated when she erected it. It was a children's play tent, ideal for the living room, not so wonderful for the rigors of a week at the Glastonbury Festival.

Nevertheless, all was well until the third day, when it rained. At the first spot, our heads turned in unison, like horrified merecats, towards that flimsy structure. You've never seen a bunch of hippies move so fast. Bin bags came from every tent and we had it covered within the minute.

It was very noisy, with thin, plastic sheets rippling in the wind, but it kept her play tent dry for the entire festival.

So you can wear it, sleep in it, create a tent from it, waterproof your dwelling with it. Oh! And bin bags can hold your trash too.  Most important thing to take beside your ticket.

It's an enduring fantasy of mine that one day I'd have the cash and courage to rock up at the Glastonbury Festival with just my purse.

There's a Millets store right on site, wherein I could buy all that I needed to camp. It would cut down on all that lugging effort, getting my tent et al up to the gate and onto the camping grounds. I've always bottled out of this, mostly because the equipment is two to three times the price of buying the same outside the festival.

However, money is a necessity, if you intend to eat and drink anything appetizing.  Don't rely upon a debit card to get your cash, because some festivals don't have ATMs.

If those do exist, then there may be large queues at them. Festivals are too short to waste time in cash machine queues.

The wonder of a pop-up tent is that you take it out of the bag, loosen the strap, throw it into the air and BAM! Your tent is fully pitched.

All you need to do now is stick a couple of pegs in and job done.

I've actually got five Quechua pop-up tents. I never meant to, but such things happen. The green sleeping tent above is my second such.

A combination of mud and inebriation destroyed the zip on the first one. I don't blame Quechua, I blame several pints of strong Somerset cider, the weather and my impatient incompetence to get through a door. Nevertheless that wasn't the end of it for that tent and festivals. It came out again when a friend needed to borrow it for the 2013 festival. Bin bags waterproofed the door.

I also have the base tent pictured above. It takes all of two minutes (if that) to erect. Most of that is pinning down guide-ropes. It provides a seating area for us all.

The red tent bag, just glimpsed on the left hand side, belongs to my fourth tiny sleeping pop-up tent. It was brought as a storage area for trolleys and beer, but has been borrowed every festival thus far by a friend to sleep in.

The fifth was picked up after the last Glastonbury Festival. It had been abandoned by another festival goer while I was sleeping. He apparently couldn't get it back into the bag. Great! It'll replace the one with the dodgy zip!

But here is the sting for these tents.  If you know what you're doing, then they are easy to pack away again. If you don't, then they are a nightmare to get back into the bag. Fortunately our entire gang are adept at it now. We pack away the pop-up tents of everyone in the vicinity!

Get the tent, but practice before you go.

This is all pretty obvious, so I won't linger here.  I'll just highlight my kit. I have an Arctic sleeping bag with a hood. I don't stint on the pillow. I take one off my bed at home and just shove it into the rucksack.

One really groovy addition is a mat which self-inflates. I just puff two breaths into the nozzle, then seal it and next thing you know it's nicely bulked out.

Also, for maximum comfort, I take a picnic blanket with a waterproof underside. That does as a carpet. Not to mention the ground-sheet that I've shoved under the tent (a bin bag will do for this), which stops groundwater rising into my tent, as well as keeping it warm.

The Glastonbury Festival has been my touchstone throughout this article. It's also a festival notorious for becoming a Mudfest. Wellies are the first thing which most veteran attendees pack!

If your festival site becomes flooded or otherwise muddied, then your rain boots allow you to traverse the site with ease.

Nor does it necessarily have to be wellies. My friend just coped beautifully with high Doc Marten boots.

I've been to plenty of Mudfests and I actually like them. The camaraderie is amazing! Everyone helps out everyone else and no-one lets a little dirt spoil the festival. It can add to the fun tremendously. Though I guess you had to be there.

Let me demonstrate with a quick YouTube round up of a Glastonbury Mudfest.

Nobody is going to remain clean for long at a festival. Sometimes showers are provided, but they are subject to ridiculously long queues and they are unreliable.

I still have a little smile to myself now over the couple of friends who once went this route. They queued for well over an hour to get to the showers. Just when they were nicely lathered with suds in their hair, the water ran out.

That was it for the day. Half-blind with soap, they had to stagger naked to find their clothes and deal with the foam as best they could. We did warn them.

Meanwhile the rest of us were reasonably clean with in-tent baby wipe baths. The beauty of baby wipes is that they are designed to clean infants, who have just answered a call of nature. If you trust these to remove the excrement from your precious little one, why not the lesser grime of a festival from your whole body?

If the sun is shining and the ways are smooth, then you could bring your wheeled suitcase. Job done. But if it's not, then we separate the veterans from those stuck in the mud and going nowhere fast.

You need BIG wheels. You need something which will plow through the mud and not splatter your stuff (unless the latter is protected by bin bags, in which case, bring it in). You need a sturdy frame, which will not buckle under the bulky weight of rucksack, tent, sleeping stuff and crates of cider.

To my mind, there's only one item for the job, which is why I shepherd festival virgins into fishing shops. 

These are designed for lugging fishing rods and tackle to riversides. They are meant to cut through undergrowth and mud, which renders them perfect for traversing festival sites with all your stuff.

My personal fishing trolley is closer to the second one pictured, but I've seen plenty of people with the first. Obviously, you don't need the slots for fishing rods. The emphasis here is on big, heavy duty tires. I've witnessed way too many people mired in a foot of mud, because the wheels on their trolleys are tiny.

Your trolley will carry in everything on my Top Ten Essential Festival Items, plus all of the associated fairy wings, tutus, crates of lager and flags, which you may also wish to bring with you. This is a festival after all!