IF YOU’RE of a certain age or social demographic, it seems like pretty much everyone you know is at the Glastonbury festival, infuriating backpack-wearing gits that they are.

Certainly this is the case in my workplace. As I look around, the empty banks of desks bring to mind the kind of mysterious epidemic that would make front-page news around the globe.

Not going? It’s understandable if you feel like you’re missing out. Almost overnight, a few fields in Somerset play host to 200,000 people, all up for fun, music and transcendental happenstances. Never understate the power of folk coming together. If they all stayed and formed an anarcho-city they would easily outproduce the nearby metropolises of Bridgewater and Shepton Mallet. At least, until the phone batteries die.

It’s easy to sneer at Glastonbury, so let’s. It’s not what it was. These days, the fields of Somerset are full of horrible middle-class people like me, guffawing and shouting their way through a weekend bookended by Florence and the Machine and the surviving members of The Who. It’s about as culturally vibrant as Last Night of the Proms and only marginally less likely to vote Tory.

Those fine dismantlers of bourgeois pretension Half Man Half Biscuit once sang: “You call Glastonbury Glasto/you’d like to go there one day/when they put up the gun towers/to keep the hippies away.”

Well, the gun towers went up in 2003 which, along with the DNA swab-based ticket identification system, rather took away the spirit of Arcadian utopia.

Like a politician with links to private healthcare mouthing off about the NHS, I should declare an interest here. I was, admittedly, kicked out of Glastonbury on my last visit for having a broken wristband and failing to provide the postcode to the place I supposedly lived with my hypothetical French wife.

I was left in the back of a van for hours while security debated what to do about me, with the doors — but not the bars — open, allowing a stream of passing punters to mock and jeer in their comedy headwear.

My excuse that “it just fell off” and that I was a last-minute replacement for a man who had done his back in was eventually rejected as being “too outlandish” and I was driven and dumped ceremoniously at the gates, without any of my belongings or even my wallet.

“How am I going to get home?”

“You should have thought about that before you tried to break in.”

I walked to Wells in the end. Which doesn’t have a station, apparently.

You might think the above has made me bitter. But you would be wrong. I am happily, if forcibly, retired from Glastonbury, and I write in joyful solidarity with my fellow non-attendees.

It’s really rather splendid. Just think — all the pubs, galleries, parks and crazy golf courses of Britain are 200,000 people less well-attended than usual. 200,000 largely terrible people — only joking, half my friends and colleagues.

In the dozen years since I last went to the festival, the weekend has taken on a new significance. It is a time to get out and about on an unnervingly peaceful weekend in early summer, enjoying the best of what Britain has to offer other than Billy Bragg.

This weekend I’ll be in Bristol, which I expect to be beautifully deserted. I’ll cycle around, singing Taylor Swift to myself, having a lovely time.

Nottingham, where I grew up, has Goose Fair weekend, during which the hordes descend for candyfloss and whirligigs, leaving the other delights of the city and surrounding area blissfully underused.

While the latter is obviously far superior, let us consider Glastonbury as the nation’s very own Goose Fair — a vaguely pagan celebration that has rather forgotten its original purpose.

And a nice chance for the rest of us to get a bit of peace and quiet.

Or you could always just stay in and watch it on the telly.