IT’S GLASTONBURY weekend. The music festival to end all festivals – regrettably one I’ve never had the opportunity to go to.

More often than not, Glastonbury takes place on the weekend of my birthday. It’s a diary clash which I’ve tried to solve, but the organisers, rightly or wrongly, will not acquiesce to my demands to switch the date.

I’d rather not wake up on my birthday in a field in Somerset. So, I’ve settled, for the last 20 years or so, for watching it on TV. Luckily, the coverage of it is absolutely magnificent.

I’d go so far to say that, perhaps, it is better than actually being there. You could replicate the whole Glastonbury experience by putting your TV at the end of your garden, whack a massive rainbow flag in the way so you can’t see anything, charge your mates £6 for a hot dog and throw a cup of urine over yourself.

But, for me, I’d rather settle down and watch it on TV, or online, where you can select one of several stages, or go back and pick out a set by a band that nine times out of ten you’d have missed if you were actually there. All that, for the price of your licence fee.

It wasn’t always as good as this, admittedly. I remember about 15 years ago, Glastonbury didn’t take place, and in its place, the organisers staged a few bands online, where people could dip in and out and watch from home. Now, it’s a decent idea. But in the year 2000, the internet was rubbish.

Everything was dial-up. It took about an hour to download a song. It was like watching it on Teletext.

I got through about 30 seconds of a Stereophonics performance before my connection timed out and I gave the whole thing up as a bad idea.

The main problem with Glastonbury is that there are ten people applying for every one ticket that goes on sale, and when 90% of your customers are going to be left disappointed, the idea of the BBC providing such a comprehensive coverage of the festival makes complete sense.

The Northern Echo: The title page of one of ten volumes of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Photograph by Jon Lewis

IT'S ONLY WORDS, AND WORDS ARE ALL I HAVE...

HAVING been dragged over the coals over my vocabulary by readers of this column in recent weeks, I feel vindicated by the Oxford English Dictionary’s stance over new words.

They have added twerk, twitterati, fo’shizzle and meh, just four of 500 new entries to the dictionary. Purists, of course, have criticised this, believing that the world is dumbing down as a result of these new words.

All right – I don’t twerk. Never have, never will – nobody wants to see that – but the OED believe that the word has been in use since 1820, long before Miley Cyrus began gyrating on our TV screens, although sometimes it feels like she has been doing it forever.

But I’ve used the latter three and probably many of the other new words that have been added. And if people are using them, then that makes it all right.

We’re not dumbing down. The English language is evolving, and the dictionary has always reflected that. We use words based on need. A horseless carriage was the old term for a car. Do the purists wish to start using that term again, just because it’s traditional? Meh.

Thousands of words have fallen out of use, such as snollygoster, crapulous, fudgel, quidnunc. But for every fudgel there will be a photobomb to replace it – and that’s fo’shizzle.

MY WEEK IN A TWEET