Mark E. Spliff

The yearly wellies or walking boots debates are pointless when some people can spend the week in wellies with absolutely zero foot problems and others can't. You might as well debate which shoe size is best.

Sadly now gone. What made Wally's head and shoulders the best bar at Glastonbury was an absolutely stunning range of real ales. The beer board over the bar was huge and included things like 11% Russian Imperial Stout and crazy ciders. Also had a huge fire-pit outside. Wally's Bar: Shangri La crew bar at Glastonbury 2013 (wallysbar.blogspot.com)

Wally's

Just to add more factors for you to wrestle over.... I've got a 3-man poled Fresh&Black job called a "quick hiker 3." (I can't find any on sale so it looks like they don't sell that particular model any more.) The reason I picked that one, apart from the Fresh&Black material is because it's got two opposite doors, which means you can have a through-flow of air. This makes a huge difference. I was banging on about reflective/dark tents on here back in 2005, long before Fresh&Black was a thing. The tent I had back then was absolutely superb - way better than Fresh&Black - but I haven't found them for sale outside Australia since. And one of the main things that made it so much better than any of the alternatives was having two doors. But no, none of these tents have porches - just little vestibule areas between each outer and inner door.

That one's not self-inflating. You have to blow it up, but it's different to a normal airbed as the air compartment is divided into hundreds of little linked pockets, which means it will keep you off the floor with less pressure/volume. I much prefer this type for festivals as they pack down to a truly miniscule size so you could take a few. Self-inflating mats, like the original Thermarest, don't pack down anywhere near as small. Personally, for Glastonbury, I'd wait until Lidl sell their own 'Crivit' branded version, which will probably be quite soon as they usually do a camping sale in spring. These are orange things that look a bit like a lilo, but don't cost much more than a tenner and do the job really well.

No worries - it really doesn't matter whether strangers on the internet believe something you say. We're rubbish. The main thing is that it's an entertaining yarn, and the true/untrue debate only adds to it

I definitely don't believe the most recent sneaking in saga above, if only for the unlikeliness of a field of tall wheat in a dairy farming area in June, plus the dialogue from the bit-part actors like the security guard was very NPC: “Cheers lads. You can never be too careful you know, when you see a couple of young lads just loitering about near the entrance...." (Any security guard who was perturbed by the concept of young people hanging round by the entrance to Glastonbury would have died of stress long before the festival had started.) Apologies if it was true, but even if it wasn't, I still thought it was a decent attempt at creative writing - I read it to the end.

Oh dear - wasn't having a pop at Hugh. This thread was initially resurrected by a genuine spammer, complete with dodgy link etc. Looks like their account has now been binned and the offending post deleted.

I don't know if Neil's on top of site admin at the moment, but he's previously requested that we don't respond when a spammer resurrects a dead thread like this and just report it instead. Makes life easier in terms of banning accounts pronto before they've had a chance to resurrect multiple threads and post possibly malicious links.