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I have had an issue with aching feet for many years which is nothing to do with fitness as I’ve always run & have plenty of practice at standing. I now have the added bonus of having to stand for 8 hours for Oxfam shifts. Sometimes my feet have hurt so much at the end of a Glastonbury day that they keep me awake even after I’ve been in bed for up to 2 hours! They still hurt but this is how I manage it better now. (1) I’d definitely say a combination of @bennyhana22& @clarkete i.e. sit down whenever you can and take shoes and socks off if possible, but at the time you have to stand, don’t stand still - dancing is far better for achy feet when you sit, take the weight RIGHT off them if you can - i.e. feet up or right out in front of you. (2) Look after your feet. It’s not too late to start getting rid of hard skin and softening them if you don’t already do this. Keep doing this while you’re there. Get a nice cooling foot treatment and at the end of each glasto day clean and cream your feet. (3) Good shoes and socks. Walking boots not wellies conditions permitting, & running trainers not classics or converse. New socks that are bamboo or have some kind of wicking element are a treat. (4) pain killers. Won’t hurt you to dose up for a few days - ibuprofen and paracetamol alternately to get you through the day. Don’t overdose but you can take both up to their stated limits (so 8 doses a day in total!) Also take something like milk thistle to support your liver & make sure you eat &/or have gaviscon or something so the ibuprofen doesn’t upset your stomach. The best thing for my feet though is always being at something I love and dancing!

Yes but you are not allowed to move a campervan once parked up.

Prescription medication should be kept in the dispensary bottle to identify what it is and who it is prescribed to. It’s not recommended to decant it.

I had B shift last year and it was really hard. On Friday I had to be up at about 4.30am to get to Stickleball for our early shift and 8 hours on our feet later we got to enjoy the rest of Friday.On Saturday we spent whole day trying to conserve energy for the night shift. On Sunday we were absolutely knackered from the night shift. Still loved it though!

At our first Oxfam festival we ended up standing guard on a giant mirror all for an overnight shift!

I would say it’s not enforced rigourously, but if you try to leave Oxfield with all your camping gear after the festival opens you will be noticed as there is security on the field, and they are likely to believe you are doing a runner from your shifts.

I got tickets for Manchester this morning so I’ve put our Scarborough tickets on Scarlet Mist at just below face value if anyone’s looking in that area! The added bonus is that apart from Manchester being so much nearer, we’ll now be in Morecambe for Morecambe music festival which is usually a top weekend in our home town! Was a bit gutted I was going to be on the other side of the country while that was happening right on my doorstep!

We tend to make the effort to get to Strummerville in a very hot afternoon when it’s the only place on site with substantial shade!

Yes - you get your shift pattern, tabard, map, shower & meal tokens etc as soon as you like after arrival. Your shifts are already set so there is no advantage in getting there sooner other than maybe getting your request on the swap board sooner. On Tuesday we tend to make sure we know where our shifts are, & just wander round the site marvelling at its emptiness, and finding crew bars & having a few drinks. You can also potentially pick up wrist bands for some of the more exclusive backstage bars in T&C & Shangrila who may not let ordinary crew in later in the week. There is a crew bar crawl on Tuesday evening.

Same as @dondo I’d recommend coming down on Monday. We also travel from the NW & it’s a fairly long journey & arriving without public traffic in the frame helps a lot. I’d also say that much like Wednesday & Thursday have become many punters favourite days, Monday & Tuesday are the days we love as volunteers. It’s lovely to be able to roam the site and check out the crew bars before the public get there and ‘spoil it’! If you don’t arrive til late on Tuesday, you miss a key part of the volunteer experience.

I can’t remember being told not to drink and neither can I remember drink having more of an effect on me. I drank - it was fine! I think the couple of times in my life that I’ve used hormonal delay my skin was a bit worse on the next period, but nothing outrageous. No other side effects noted for me. One of the few joys of getting older is not having to deal with all this any more!

I have taken the hormonal delay pill and it was OK but I was a bit nervous as I was told it didn’t guarantee it would be delayed. That was a long time ago though so effectiveness may have improved. I have also had my period at Glastonbury and I can only recommend having a good supply of painkillers, & of wet wipes and pocket tissues so that you can ensure your hands and the loos are clean enough to deal with changing towels/tampons. If it’s not too late to delay your period I’d recommend it. It’s all round easier.

Getting into June there will be some again as people get late changes of circumstances (illness/injury/bereavement) that means they can’t go after all. Right now we are in the drought phase after people that got tickets other ways, or went for a refund because they just decided they’d been a bit hasty signing up to work and can’t face it after all, and the late cancellations. Don’t give up hope. If you can go at late notice there’s always a decent chance.

No - but you can look for a swap. Might be someone else in a similar boat with a different act.

Thought with victims obviously and that is the most important thing, but saw him at Sziget last year and he was brilliant so really disappointed that he turns out to be even more of a twat than the throw away comment at the Brits suggested. In the last year I also loved a new band called The Shakes who split in the wake of their lead singer being called out as a rapist & general sex pest. Such a shame when good music goes bad.

When I had earlies I got notification on my birthday- 5th June. Glastonbury is quite early this year so I think that notification might be too.

That’s the one….so far out it wasn’t even on the map, and about another mile to walk AFTER getting the minibus! Literally nothing happened there, ever. Zzzzzzzz

I had pre- festival shifts a couple of years ago and was on shift with someone who had only got a spot the week before the festival & had never done it before. It can be very random but there are very few pre-festival shifts and you do have to be very lucky to get them.

To be fair none of the best jobs are at Glastonbury. At other festivals you have a chance of being posted close to stages and still being in touch with music during the festival. There isn’t much, if any, of this at Glastonbury. At Glastonbury I think it’s possibly best to be on a Ped gate that is reasonably close to the campsite, so that you don’t have too far to walk to your shift and you’re reasonably occupied during it and interacting with a generally happy public. Crossings can be OK for similar reasons. I’d say the worst is getting a quiet vehicle gate (literally) miles from the campsite. Tiring getting there and back, and really dull.

It depends a lot on what kind of shift you get on weds/Thurs I think. I think that if you get a pedestrian gate, that’s probably where you’ll stay, but if you get a car park/traffic crossing/ vehicle gate - you are more likely to have a non-matching shift.

It’s possible - I think all the shift patterns do get one shift out of the way on Wednesday or Thursday, but if you have your overnight on Friday or Saturday, it impacts in both days. Last year we had Wednesday afternoon, Friday morning (needing to be up at the crack of dawn and working til 2pm) and Saturday overnight (10pm to 6am) which took out Saturday night headliners and meant a very slow start on Sunday. Glastonbury is not an easy festival to work because there is so much walking to get to many of the shifts, and then so much walking when you want to enjoy yourself too! The shift pattern I got isn’t untypical in its overall nature in that when you aren’t on a shift, there’s likely to be some extent to which you are recovering from a shift. After our shift on Friday I remember seeing TLC, Sleaford Mods, Dub Pistols, Idles, Sam Fender and Billie Eilish - so we had a really good run after our shift. Saturday, the first thing we did was took the things we would need for our overnight shift to lockups at that end of the site. We took it pretty steady and we saw Celeste and The Avalanches, spending time in crew bars in between. We could hear Megan Thee Stallion and PaulMcCartney drifting over to where we were stationed. Sunday - we felt pretty devastated as the overnighter is a killer, but after a sleep we got down to The Pyramid for the end of Diana Ross, wandered up to The Acoustic and sat outside for The Bootleg Beatles, wandered back down for Lourde, and wound up with The Dualers at Avalon as our Sunday headliner. We then partied in the Acoustic crew bar to about 3am before deciding the festival had done us. I think that’s a reasonable example of how you might juggle working with the festival and how your shifts might impact. The last shift is a clearing the site shift - car park duty etc - & yes it is Monday daytime - needing to go through to sort of mid-evening.

The key word here are ‘there’s every chance’ Every time I volunteer at a festival now I am a little anxious about what I’ll miss, but if I don’t volunteer, I know what I’ll miss.

Can I just say that I didn’t mean to turn this into a football thread, I just thought was similar in terms of losing control of profiteering once you put in ‘exceptions’.

I have a season ticket for Aston Villa. If I can’t go one week, I can pass it on to a friend for free as long as I tell them and they can record it. If I want to sell it, I have to return it to the club for resale, and they won’t even try to resell it until they have sold every last seat in the ground. If they catch someone with my ticket & it hasn’t been re-assigned, I’ll get punished with a one match ban the first time, increasing for further incursions. If I ring up and say I’m passing my ticket in to a friend because I can’t go, there’s absolutely no way of them knowing whether that’s my friend or not, or whether any money is changing hands. They have all these rules, and that little loophole is WIDE open. That’s how it would be with ‘genuine ‘ transfers of Glastonbury tickets if it was allowed.