Thirty years this month, I woke up in a tent I was sharing with three mates at the Glastonbury Festival to find that, overnight, someone had crept in and stolen all our gear.

And by gear I mean it in all senses of the word. Clothes, shoes, fags, deodorant – plus all other festival ‘essentials’ – all gone.

We’d only arrived the previous afternoon after driving up from east Kent. It put us in something of a bind.

Not only had we faced the prospect of a rather smelly weekend sans showers, but, as teenagers or 20-year-olds, we were in the prime of our whiffing days. Now we had no clothes to change into either. Not even a spare pair of pants between us.

We searched the surrounding campsite in the forlorn hope of the crooks opening the bags, being put off by the array of indie band t-shirts we’d brought with us and dump it. We found one shoe about 100 yards away. It wasn’t going to be enough between us.

Leaving aside, for one moment, how four strapping lads did not wake to hear the rustle of a thief unzipping our tent and then half-inching our bags, we trudged up to the main festival administrative area to see if – hope against hope – someone had handed them in. They hadn’t. Instead we were advised to report it to the police on-site.

Being the middle-class chaps we were, we joined the lengthy queue of other people who had suffered the same fate as us and trudged into a Portacabin, individually, to explain to a policeman that we were victims of the most heinous crime.

He was a nice chap, the copper we spoke to. I explained that there was nothing of great worth other than a big multi-pack of Silk Cut I’d bought along to keep me going.

He pushed over his rolling tobacco and papers and invited me to make one. I had to admit I didn’t know how to construct one from scratch.

“You must be the only person on this site who doesn’t,” he quipped. He had a point. He did it for me, bless him. Not my proudest moment.

But then, in 1993, Glastonbury was a rather different animal. It didn’t warrant 24-hour coverage on the BBC for starters. In fact, it wasn’t on TV at all. Given the BBC’s love affair with it, you’ll be hard-pushed not to be drenched in Glasto-fever over the next ten days.

Plus, there were precious few of those ruddy flags everyone seems obliged to now hoist above the heads. You just had to remember where you were sat or stood.

But then there were only 70,000 people attending (not counting those who climbed the fence, of course). Today it’s 210,000 (ringed by a heavily guarded perimeter). So perhaps a flag is a necessity.

We’d been the year before and fell in love with the place. While everyone else had headed to Reading to watch Nirvana, me and a mate had opted for the mystical countryside of Somerset as our summer outing.

The sun shone, the crowds weren’t insane and we discovered that, if you timed it right, you could drive off the site and into the local town every morning where the public toilets acquired near-luxury status compared to the on-site option (which was genuinely a mass ditch with toilet seats perched above – all rather medieval).

We didn’t get Nirvana, but that year we did get the wonderful Carter USM as headliners (one of them lives in Folkestone now, by the way), plus the likes of James (who replaced Morrissey who’d pulled out at the last minute), Blur (who were then very much an ‘afternoon slot’ outfit) and Shakespear’s Sister.

For an indie fan in a pre-Britpop era, the line-up was, quite literally, music to our ears: The Levellers, Cud, Lush, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, the Senseless Things. In short, all bands who probably made more money through flogging t-shirts than they ever did – back then at least – through record sales.

Tickets cost £49. Today they’re an eye-watering £335.

The 1993 festival included the likes of a reformed Velvet Undergound, The Verve (although before they put ‘The’ in front of their name), The Lemonheads and a rousing set by, ahem, Rolf Harris.

As for my crime-caused wardrobe dilemma? Well, the good news is that Glastonbury was never short of a clothes stall – or emergency toiletries – and back then the prices didn’t seem too ludicrous. Hello gaudy tie-dyed trousers and new array of t-shirts. They probably still lurk at the bottom of my wardrobe.

We managed to attend one more festival there the following year, 1994 (and managed to get our (this time far smaller) tent broken into again and a camera stolen this time – the previous year’s lesson not learned).

It never detracted from the experience or spoilt the weekend. Which is high praise indeed – today I’d be spitting blood and fuming. That what old age does to you.

You used to be able to buy tickets comfortably a month or so before the gates opened. Then Britpop arrived and all the bands who performed there suddenly became chart stars. Tickets swiftly became the equivalent of gold dust.

Then life started racing away with itself. I’ve never been back.

Every year I ponder it. Every year I baulk at the price of tickets and remember those bloody awful toilets.

Plus, perhaps most significantly, I consider attending a festival as a youngster is one thing – as a man now in his 50s, quite another. Maybe one day, for old time’s sake...if I win the lottery and can glamp it.