Over the years, I suspect, I have spent too much time in tents. I have tightened my flaps on the veldt, as lions yawned 20 feet away. I have hurled bottles of shampoo at marauding Indian monkeys. Thanks to an accommodation mix-up as a teenager, I once spent a month living in a two-man tent with three boys, a girl, and a small, flatulent dog. And yet, when I am asked to consider the true horror of camping, it is to Pilton that I always return. The Glastonbury Festival, 2005. Friday morning. The flood.

As you may know, torrential rain on the roof of your tent is a scary, primordially upsetting sound. Imagine it being augmented by the sound of torrential rain on the roofs of 60,000 other tents. We tried shouting. We tried screaming. We tried a selection of hymns. Nothing. More than 100,000 people all packed together, and nobody could even hear us. We were hungry, thirsty, and in need of toilets, and we hadn't yet got around to buying anything that was waterproof. We waited until we could wait no more.

How to make you understand this? I went alone, in trainers, jeans and a jacket. By the time I was standing upright, I was soaked to the skin. The steep path down the hill had become a river. Toilets to my right, half submerged. Below them, unspeakable horror. People wandered aimlessly, under-dressed and staring, probably like after a bomb. The Hunter's welly stall was like a UN feeding station. Forlorn ponchos underfoot. Over-dressed North London mothers, wailing as their expensive three-wheeler off-road prams sank. This was a time for selfishness. Others were in the same boat, but it was hard to care. Unless they were one of those forward-thinking buggers down by the stage, who actually had boats.

Such things have passed into festival folklore, but I was there. I bloody saw it. Awful. Worse than you would believe. But here's the thing. Next time, two years later, I went back.

Glastonbury 2007. Not quite as bad. Merely wet and deeply unpleasant, much like 2004, or the last day of 2003. But in the air, amid the damp, there was a bad vibe. This was new. You could almost see it, rising from heads like steam. “Again? I fell for this again?” Tickets for 2008 go on sale tomorrow. Registrations, apparently, are way down. Can we be surprised? It's been a disaster zone for the best part of half a decade.

With the collapse of the music industry, bands need festivals and through the summer there is almost one every weekend. As our everyday worlds continue to lose any notion of community, it is remarkable how keen we have become to have our fun in groups. Tickets for last year's Glastonbury sold out in two hours. What is suddenly the problem? Is it the line-up, or sludge fatigue?

Of course, if this year's festival is smaller and sun-kissed, that could reinvigorate the legend. And that's the dilemma. What if you aren't there? Well, it's too late for me. I didn't register. And already, I am waking at night. What if it is brilliant? What if there is glorious sunshine and solid, dry turf, and I'm watching on BBC Three, and feeling like the kid who missed the school disco?

Richard Morrison is away

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