I firmly believe I was destined to go to Glastonbury this year. I happened to check my email from work and read on one of the mailing lists I'm on that tickets had sold out the day before, but that W.A.S.T.E. had 500 going on sale that afternoon. I went to the site and the message on it said that tickets "would be going on sale soon". In the time it took me to text a friend and them to say "Yeah, go for it", I hit 'Refresh', and there was the sale screen. By the time I'd booked two tickets and gone back to the sale screen to get a parking ticket just in case, everything was sold out.

Timing…

Two weeks before the event, and I'm totally brassic, as is the person I was going to go with, and after much agonising we reluctantly agree I should try and flog the tickets. The first person who wants them sends an email with an offer in, which doesn't reach me for ages. Meanwhile I put them on ebay and get a decent price, and someone else shows some interest. But then the ebay buyers pull out and so do the others, the first person who wanted them has lost her purse, no-one else is interested, and my boss reminds me that we're due for a bonus at work this month. I think "You know what? Fuck this, I'm going to Glastonbury" and I ring my friend and tell him that he's coming too, that I'll lend him the money if he needs me to and he can shut up and pack his tent and I'll be round on Thursday morning. And so it was.

Having spent the entire journey swigging from a bottle of vodka and Fanta, we arrived at the Glastonbury site around tea time on Thursday. Nothing that anyone had told me about the size of the place had prepared me for it. I was gobsmacked, laughing incredulously half at the sheer scale of it, and half at the fact that I was here at all. At last.

Having met the lovely internet-chums-made-flesh, a trio of us wander off to chill out for a while, but I make the silly purchase of dodgy baked goods and for a while there, it all goes a bit Jacob's Ladder. Blue lips, you say? Why is this happening? I didn't do this - I wanted to do that, but not this. And I never felt so safe and warm as when I was being hugged by a Wiccan in my dark hour - sorry I swore, sorry the mint cake melted in your bag, sorry sorry sorry and thank you. Floating into the med tent on a gurney, and was that me swearing? Sorry, nurse and thank you Bob. Sleep it off for a while, stumble back to camp via the hot dog stand. Off to bed, write the night off, put it down to experience, hope everyone doesn't think I'm too much of an arse, and wait for my first full day of Glastonbury.

Woke up on Friday with a pretty clear head and stood on the hill outside our tents, agog at the sea of….stuff….things….people. That became my morning ritual. I was desperate to see The Darkness, having liked what I'd heard of them so far, and they didn't disappoint. Singer Justin asked "Who delivers rock before breakfast?" and they did exactly what it said on the tin. The thing about The Darkness is, regardless of the endlessly entertaining tongue-in-cheek RAWK posturing and onstage banter , they are a bloody good band. You just couldn't get away with a falsetto version of Street Spirit without having a voice as good as Justin's. And that's their secret - a seriously accomplished band, hiding behind a nice unthreatening don't-take-us-too-seriously façade. Get your hands offa my Darkness record, muthafukka-ah-ah-ah-ahhhh.

On Friday night, REM headlined and frankly, I wasn't that bothered about seeing them - they've not registered much on my radar since Out of Time. But having a slightly happier head on than normal, I found myself loving their set - bouncing around and singing at the top of my lungs, and I guess they turned out to be one of my favourites.

Saturday morning saw me finally shaking off a terrible comedown with a cup of fruit salad and Ozomatli, the band who happened to be on the Pyramid stage when my buddy and I walked past. The sun was out and Ozomatli sounded like a crazy mariachi band with political rappers in tow. We were soon dancing away with the rest of the swelling crowd, feeling good and ready for another round of Glasto. Sunburn was the main order of the day, with a side dish of sitting around listening to various bands. I wandered lots on my own, got lost and was happy to be lost - people watching, stall scouring, pear cider quaffing, and sitting around in the forest of flags that slap in the wind in front of the One World stage. At least, I think it was the One World stage - my sense of direction in that place was really, really bad and I put it down to the fact that wandering aimlessly was just so much fun.

And in the evening - Radiohead. Other people will review them in words I could never string together, so I won't even try. Seeing Thom grinning out at us - the pixie king, delighted with his doting subjects - filled me with joy. And pride, though don't ask me why. They had presence like you wouldn't believe and you knew everyone around you could feel it too. Moving, touching, stirring, mmmmm.

Sunday was another day of wandering and seeing - this time, though, I took in a lot more of the whole site - the Avalon field, Lost Vagueness and, at the end of the night, the Tipi Field, where my friend and I sat and gazed in awe, promising ourselves that we would save up enough money to be able to set up a business doing something useful and live our lives on the festival circuit. As you do. We put our cigarette butts in the empty packet, and picked up the litter others had left around us. It was so calm and beautiful - a gorgeous end to the weekend, though I was sad later when I realised I'd missed a friend's birthday party.

I already can't remember which day it was we went to the Circus field and I sat on the floor with a bunch of children, playing with a man or woman dressed in a huge life-like gorilla suit. Or which day some friends and I found ourselves sitting behind a sound tower, sandwiched between two female rappers in gold lamé boob tubes on a stage and a naked man playing Kylie tunes from the caravan out of which he was running some kind of pirate radio station. Or the name of the girl who approached my mate and I in a field because we "looked like the friendliest people here" and, because we let her use one of our phones to call her lost companions, shared her beer and smokes with us and chatted for ages. Or when it was that my friend and I were dancing a cha-cha-cha in the dark, in the pouring rain. Or why I never did get round to telling everyone I met or went with how much I loved being with them. It doesn't matter now - it's all there in my head and my heart.

So that was my first Glastonbury, and there's so much more I could say. Sometimes it wouldn't be so whimsical and misty-eyed, sometimes it would be raucous and dirty and full of explicit tales of toilets and gore and booze and drugs. Sometimes it would be more about the music. Sometimes it would be excited gabbling about how fantastic it all was and how much it blew my mind. Sometimes it would be more about the politics. None of that would be enough, and for now I'm still enjoying the fact I can hold the memory up like a kaleidoscope, and with a quick twist I can look at it from different angles and see a new thing each time.

Aïcha Boyd