My completely unprepared trip to Glastonbury | Greg Barila

Rain and mud. Outrageous rip-offs. Nude tea shops and a dodgy masseuse ... Greg Barila was completely unprepared for his first Glastonbury music festival.

When I say I wasn’t prepared for Glastonbury, I mean that in every sense of the word.

As part of my very first trip overseas in 2005 I was barely prepared to leave the house, let alone attend one of the world’s biggest music festivals.

I certainly wasn’t prepared for the torrential rain, the three days of mud, the ruthless rip-off merchants or the full-frontal nudity.

Tagging along with my much better travelled and far better organised friend, Scott, I brought exactly none of the things you might be expected to bring when camping out at a notoriously soggy three day music festival in the middle of England.

Not shelter, not sleeping gear, not appropriate wet-weather clothes, not proper toiletries.

I didn’t even bring a towel!

Scott (left) and Greg Barila at Glastonbury, 2005.

Cut to me and Scott queuing at the vaguely titled Glastonbury “general supplies tent”, where unprepared festival-goers had the pleasure of paying grossly inflated prices for items we should have brought with us in the first place – like towels.

Then I was quickly … whatever the opposite of relieved is … when I opened up the towel I’d just purchased to find it was not much bigger than a table napkin, and apparently the only size available.

For reasons I prefer to remain unknown, it also had a suspicious looking stain on it (optimistically I’m going to say it was caused by bleach) which seemed to indicate that my pathetically tiny towel was also possibly pre-owned.

I can still hear Scott laughing now. Because he’s still laughing about it nearly 20 years later.

At this point, I should have thrown in the towel but I didn’t have one, so instead I soldiered on.

Scott generously lent me a sleeping bag and let me buddy up with him in the two man tent he had cleverly thought to bring because he was not a complete moron.

The tent was small (it looked massive next to my little towel!) but as the rain pelted down that night, we were warm and dry. We even managed to see some music.

Elvis Costello, if you don’t mind. Things were looking up.

Greg Barila with a couple of fellow festivalgoers at Glastonbury in 2005.

Until the next morning when I woke to discover I’d left one of my sneakers on the ground outside, angled precisely so the rain could run down the side of our tent and flow directly into it, filling it to the brim. (Scott found that funny, too).

Being England, the chances of the sun appearing for long enough to dry my shoe out so I could wear it, were roughly similar to my chances of being able to properly dry myself with a comically small towel.

And so I found myself stepping gingerly down the side of a slippery muddy mountain with supermarket bags tied around my feet, to go in search of a pair of gumboots.

Unfortunately the approximately 200,000 other Glasto-goers all had the same idea, so when I finally got back to the supply tent it looked like a war zone or, worse than that, the toilet paper aisle at Woolies just before lockdown.

I managed to secure a pair, but not before losing a full 100 pounds cash in the mud as I fumbled through my travel belt to pay (yes, my travel belt – I told you I was a travel virgin).

If this were a movie scene, a single tear might have rolled down my face. I couldn’t tell, because just then, the heavens opened up and the most fantastic rain I’d ever seen in my life started in sideways and lasted for what felt like hours.

Sad, cold, soggy and poor, I sought refuge in Glastonbury’s “Healing Fields”, a section of the festival’s vast acreage with stalls offering gong therapy and crystal treatments and funny smelling herbs that may or may not have been legal.

My muscles aching, I was delighted when I saw a guy wandering around offering massages, inviting people to pay whatever they thought was fair.

That was the first warning sign I missed.

Other bright red flags I totally ignored included that this meandering masseuse had none of the usual accoutrements of a professional therapist.

And also the fact that he directed me to lie on a tent floor before proceeding to … well, 18 years later and I still can’t tell you exactly what he did, but it certainly wasn’t a massage.

In the distance, the crowd roared to the sound of The Kaiser Chiefs and Interpol – you know, what I should have been doing instead of getting tangled up with some bloke in a felt hat who was about to start messing about with my chakras but – and it’s important to stress this – doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING even closely resembling a therapeutic massage.

For 20 minutes he feebly ran his hands up and down my back while I tried to calculate the negative amount of pounds I thought was fair to pay for this “massage”.

Then things got weird.

Without warning or explanation, he started rolling me along the canvas like a human rolling pin, back and forth and back and forth, until the final crescendo when I ended up at uncomfortably close range staring at his crotch.

There was certainly some manipulation going on here, but it wasn’t in the area of my tired and aching muscles.

When the mumbo jumbo was finished I should have scowled, handed him a fiver and slunk away with my still-knotted shoulders.

As a person who likes to avoid confrontation what I actually did was grumble a bit and hand over the equivalent of $70 Australian dollars. Well, at least my wallet felt lighter!

Now in desperate need of comfort, I plonked myself down at a café and ordered a cup of strawberry tea – then almost spat it across the tent when I was suddenly met at eye level with the unmistakeable sight of a man’s unbridled genitalia as he went casually walking by.

Before I had a chance to fully process what I’d just seen, a very naked woman sauntered past, then another. I’d never seen that at Gloria Jean’s!

As I turned to look around I realised almost everybody in the café was quite unencumbered by clothing, going in and out of a steam hut just outside the back of the tent, gadding about in the nuddy and swatting themselves with (normal-sized) towels.

No, there was no mistaking it, I was in a nude sauna that just happened to do a tidy trade in unusual tea blends. I’ve never finished a cup of tea so quickly.

You’ll never guess Scott’s reaction when I finally returned to base camp. That’s right, he found it very funny. And I guess I do, too, all these years later.