God, you just have to conclude, hates a hippy. Or, if He does love hippies, he only really likes them if they’re wet. For as dawn broke yesterday it was clear that, whatever the high hopes earlier in the week, this will be the fifth brown Glastonbury in eleven years.

Six hours of overnight rain had left the green fields churned up like chocolate mousse. As I queued for my traditional “first sausage hoagy of Glastonbury”, I could compare the yellow puddle I was standing in with its fathers and forefathers of 1997, 1998, 2005 and 2006. In brief, I can inform you it was not an Epic Brown Year, scoring a mere 5/10 on the Vietnam-O-Meter. But it was enough to have already the Olive Tea-Room up in the Shangri-La fields, “while we shovel out mud”.

So why, then, do people still come here? The brief answer, of course, is that they do not. Or not in the numbers they once did. Whereas Glastonbury used to sell out in two hours, as the gates opened in 2008, 3,000 tickets remained unsold. A year of bad press, concentrating mainly on mud, the complex ticket-booking system and the “controversial” choice of the rapper Jay-Z to headline has damaged Glastonbury’s image. Where once it was a dreamland paradise, it now looks worn, outdated and simply outclassed by other rival festivals.

But you know what? It all makes sense when you get down here. On a 1,000-acre site devoted to freaky thought and pleasure, if you can’t find something to make you glad you came, either a) you’re a termagant curmudgeon, or b) you didn’t pack a mac. Up in two of the new fields on the expanded site, Trash City and Shangri-La, the traditional Glastonbury spirit (post-Apocalyptic inventiveness and rogue thought) is much in evidence.

The entrance of Rocket Ray’s Juke Joint is fashioned from a crash-landed Second World War bomber, split into two. The tail-end has seating, while the nose-cone holds a pin-ball machine. Two men were playing a match for 50p stakes. They were dressed as skeletons, in top hats, with red velvet hearts on strings hanging from their rib-cages. “Last year we came dressed as fat American tourists,” Paul, 27, said. “But this year, we’ve been on a crash diet.” Along the muddy track is the Tilted Disco, which looks like a quotidian three-bed, red-brick semi but which opens out into a disco with a sofa nailed, upside-down, to the ceiling. It is run by a man called Strawberry, and each entering dancer is given plastic-lensed spectacles that make the whole room split into rainbow prisms. The effect, unexpectedly thrilling, is that you are in an episode of Doctor Who from the late 1970s, being subjected to a magnetic anomaly in time and space. Although there is, at the back of the disco, a nod of the hat towards Glastonbury’s new, commercial face – branded “Tilted Disco” T-shirts, £15.

Over in the Green Fields, the talk was all about the festival’s newest innovation: Comfy Crappers. Ten wooden huts, decked out with flower-filled wellies and clouds of incense, offer the festivalgoer a moment of civilisation, as they go about the necessary business of the day. Despite the charges (£2.50 for a single visit, £5 for three, £27 for the whole weekend) the queue for these oases of cleanliness and calm extends halfway up the field. “My boyfriend bought me a poo for my birthday,” Emily, 22, says, exiting one of the huts. “I have to say, it’s the best present I’ve ever had.”

As I leave, a rather tipsy customer is asking if they can have their money back “as I didn’t do anything. I only had wind”.

However, one of the newest and, perhaps, most symbolic parts of Glastonbury is up on the hills, above the park, where two new fields have been bought. At any other festival these new fields, with a panoramic view over the site, would have been filled with profit-turning burger stalls, chip vans and tents selling hen-night cowboy hats. At Glastonbury, they have been left empty, save for hundreds of sunset-coloured silk flags, billowing in the twilight.

“They’re just somewhere for people to sit,” Emily Eavis, Michael Eavis’s daughter, and joint organiser of the festival, explained to The Times this year. “Just somewhere to think.”

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