Reading Festival: The festival that scarred me for life This is the time of year when the posh papers print their guides to the summer music festivals and I suddenly begin to feel extremely old. It is now 40 years since I attended my first rock festival, at the tender age of 17 in 1972. And it was so harrowing an experience that it was also my last for more than three decades. The festival was Reading, still going strong, and I went with two friends from school. None of us had tents, just sleeping bags and sheets of polythene to keep the worst of the rain off - and it rained a lot. Not that you could get any sleep anyway, because drug-dealers patrolled the site throughout the night, plaintively crying out their wares: "Speed, weed, trips!" Innocents that we were, we got by with nothing stronger than warm beer, Number 6 cigarettes and greasy hamburgers. I will never forget my first visit to the lavatories, trenches in the earth resembling a scene from Hieronymus Bosch. And though the music was often terrific - I have particularly happy memories of Rod Stewart and the Faces and Ten Years After - by the end of three days I felt like a very damp, blank-eyed zombie and was suffering auditory hallucinations. On the late train home, I kept hearing a phantom band playing in my head. We disembarked at Paddington at about two in the morning, slept on the station concourse, and my poor Dad had to meet us later that morning with cash for our rail fares home as we had run out of money. I steered clear of big festivals after that, until The Daily Telegraph sent me to Glastonbury a few years ago. It was an experience so exhausting and bewildering that I went back on the fags after a three-year layoff, and had a little cry under a hedge when it started to rain. But there is one festival I love, and that is Guilfest. Staged in Guildford's Stoke Park, it's only 20 minutes down the road from our house, so I can get home each night and have a shower and a good night's sleep. The atmosphere is invariably cordial, and resembles a village fete as much as a rock festival. In recent years I have seen Brian Wilson, Blondie, Squeeze and one of my great discoveries of recent years, the splendidly bolshie and spaced-out Brian Jonestown Massacre. This year the line-up includes the great Bryan Ferry and the wonderful disco outfit Chic, featuring the legendary Nile Rogers. With those two acts, even pouring rain will seem only a minor inconvenience. But my bet is that the sun will shine on Guilfest.