Previous Convictions: Assignments from Here and There - Softcover

What is it with hippies and fire? You only have to spark up a Zippo and four of them will come and stare contentedly into the flame. At Glastonbury they light up everywhere. In the field in front of the main stage while some deathless bit of old pop flotsam is offering his timeless classic in the middle of 300,000 swaying, wigged-out happy campers, you'll trip over a little family of hippies, cross-legged in front of an improvised bonfire, watching the salamanders and phoenixes in the flames with their third eyes. I saw a bloke stroll down one of the festival's makeshift ley-lines and just put a match to a pile of rubbish. It wasn't so much an act of pyromania as the offering of a small prayer, the elemental, Promethean act of spiritual bollocks. In the age of nuclear fission and quantum physics, plasma screens and 3G cells, hippies can still look into a fire and see the meaning of life and the answer to everything.

So there I am, you see, seven sentences in, and I've started already with the hippy baiting. You just can't help it; to know them is to mock them. What's amazing is that they've lasted so long. At the bottom of the child-line of bullied pop trends, hippies are now in their third generation. Born in the mid-sixties into a blizzard of mockery, they've suffered, for forty years, the ridicule of almost everyone. They've tried rebranding as yippies, travelers, crusties, hairies, the tribe, the clan, eco-warriors, alternative health practitioners and outreach coordinating social workers. But we all know they're just the same old hippies in a new shapeless jersey. And credit where credit's due, what other useful fad or fashion has lasted as long? No one says, "Oh, you sad old teddy boy." Your mods, rockers, suedeheads, soul boys, new romantics, Goths, punks and Bay City Rollerettes are now just embarrassing photographs and a ridiculous pair of shoes at the back of the wardrobe. Only hippies have transcended the natural life-span of their music and knitwear.

And if you sit down and think about them without sniggering, there's a lot of hippy shit you quite like. Flower power became the green movement, and you quite like that. The don't-work-just-feel-the-vibe-and-roll-a-spliff thing has its points, and as a weekend mini-break you'd rather make love than war. And you wouldn't mind fathering a lot of blond kids from a number of surprisingly attractive and nonjudgmental free-spirited women who can bake. Actually, when you get right down to it, there's a bit of you that would like to live in a tepee. Yes, there is. With some mates and Liv Tyler in August. It would be a laugh and you quite fancy having a go on those Celtic drums. (Obviously, you don't want the Hoover-bag hair, the scabies, the compost sleeping bag, a mate called Bracken and a lurcher called Stephen.)

Perhaps we all need to get in touch with our inner hippies. Which is partially why I decided, finally, that it was time to go to Glastonbury. It's funny, Glastonbury. It's a secret password. Whisper it to gray men in offices, your accountant, your MEP, a hedge-fund analyst, and it's likely a look of beatific remembrance will pass like a cloud over the sun and they'll say, "Yes, I went once, years ago." Glastonbury is a secret medieval heresy that's remembered with hidden joy. "I was once a free-love hippy, Mott the Hoople acolyte and hand-painted chillum maker" is probably not what you want to hear from the merchant banker handling your corporate takeover. Actually, medieval heresy is the decorative theme of Glastonbury, which, by the way, means "place of woad," or more exactly "place of the woad people." Inside, the huge curtain wall of the temporary, self-governing state of Glastonbury is a reprise of the thirteenth century, or at least the "Jabberwocky" version of it, while outside the Black Death of progress tears up the earth and eats people. Getting into Glastonbury is about as easy as the Black Prince found getting into Calais.

Having made the decision to find my inner hippy at Glastonbury, I had to make a decision as to what sort of hippy I was looking for. Was it Swampy? Or Donovan? Or was it the Marquis of Bath? Over the years there's been quite a variety of hippies. You could, if you so wished, hold a Eurovision Hippy Contest or a Hippy Olympics. I like to think of Glastonbury as Hippy Crufts, a walled, heretic, medieval Hippy Crufts. That just about gets the flavor.

I have an advantage in shopping for an inner hippy because this is my second go. I was there at the start. I'm a child of the sixties, albeit at school in rural Hertfordshire, which wasn't exactly Woodstock or the Prague Spring or even Eel Pie Island. But we had the music and the hair and a bit of Red Leb and I know where my nascent, born-again hippy lurks. He's a cross between Malcolm McDowell and William Blake with a dash of Jethro Tull. This is really the crux. I'm fifty this year. Glastonbury is the last act of my forties. Glastonbury is unfinished business now that I'm closer to an undertaker than I am to boarding school.

When I was a hippy first time round we used to say, never trust anyone over thirty (with shrill, clipped, upper-middle-class accents). Now I'm over fifty I'd add, never sleep in a tent over thirty. I'll do Glastonbury but I'll do Glastonbury Soft, Glastonbury Lite, which is why I'm sitting above the twenty-mile traffic jam in a Winnebago. Not for me the stews and refugee camps of windy canvas, the dank sleeping bag; a Winnebago is the way to go. You see, a mobile home is a great luxury, the stars' accessory, the private box on nature unless -- and this is a big unless -- it actually is your home, in which case it's trailer trash. Ours appears to be the main residence of the man who's driving it. It has the mildly weird feeling of trying to hold a dinner party in a peculiarly strange man's bedsit with him in the inglenook saying, "Don't mind me."

I'm traveling with my girlfriend. This will be the last year I'm able to say "girlfriend" without sounding utterly Alan Clark. I'm also taking Matthew, my personal photographer, another little luxury you can give yourself after forty-five (going to Books and sticking the things in the albums is such a bore), and Alice BB, who's a dear and here because when I told her I was going, she became so overexcited I thought she just might rip off all her clothes and do floral finger-painting on her body. So I said she was welcome to tag along, as it was a sort of hippyish thing to say. She is still improbably buoyant, staring out of the window, squeaking like a spaniel going shooting.

Getting into Glastonbury is like crossing a particularly fraught border: there are thousands of policemen -- or pigs, as I suppose I must go back to calling them, hundreds of cones and signs and labels, a Kafkaesque amount of paperwork and when you see the security fence marching across the country it's a reminder that the price of freedom, to be a bit of an anarchist and a fire-worshiper, is a lot of razor wire and a bulk discount from Group Four.

We finally park in the private, behind-stage, Bands and VIPs field, which is like a pilot for a Channel 4 sitcom: Celebrity Trailer Trash. Over there is Kate Moss, the pinup sprite, the Bardot of postmodern Notting Hippydom. I go and find the press tent to get more passes and paperwork, and bump into Roland White, a man whose hidden hippy has probably been sold for medical research. He does my television column when I'm not there. I'm only introducing Roland as a walk-on here because he made one very clever observation and I don't want him to think I'm stealing it. "Have you seen the tented village yet?" he asked. "Well, when you do, you'll notice it's become a tented suburb. Well, a number of suburbs. It's rather John Betjeman; there are people laying out gardens and putting up carriage lamps."

Inside the press tent the latest news is that no one's managed to make it over the wall but security guards with dogs have apprehended ten people and they're all Liverpudlian (the liggers, not the dogs). It's like the punch line to a joke, isn't it? "...And they were all Scousers." The tickets are now £100 each so naturally, in a right-on, hippyish way, we're all for people breaking in over the wire. But on the other hand we're jolly pleased when they get caught. There's a lot of nostalgia about Glastonbury: people who've been here every year since they did it without microphones say they miss the gangs of Hell's Angels, the drug-dealers' turf wars, the endemic thievery, the adulteration and overdoses, which just shows you can be nostalgic about anything.

The truth is that this alternative weekend nirvana all comes down to plumbing and waste management. There are armies of kids who've been given tickets in exchange for picking up rubbish, of which there is an extraordinary amount. But it's bogs that are really the central leitmotif of Glastonbury. It's all about one thing: colonic endurance. Can you go the full three days without going? Because the very thought is so nauseous, so utterly medieval, it makes a colostomy bag sound like a civilized option. There are plenty of loos laid out like back-to-back miners' cottages. You can see the rows of feet in the morning, the whole-earth pasty shoe next to the Nike Airs, next to Doc Martens. That's the thing that's rarely mentioned about hippies -- they've managed to achieve completely unisexual footwear but, my darling, the smell.

By the third morning it's, well, it's half a million turds and all the trimmings. There are horror stories of dropped stashes, of tripping and slipping, of horrible, horrible rectal explosions. But for me the most poignant, the most grisly, is the girl who told me she'd been putting off the call of nature for as long as sphincterally possible and until she was so comprehensively stoned and drunk she could face the drop. So at 2 AM she gingerly made her way to the pitch-black amenities block. Opening the door, she dropped her pants and with the tense precision of a Romanian gymnast, lowered her posterior over the open sewer. Something cold and clammy squidged between the che...