TONIGHT, and indeed the whole of this weekend, my life will be dull.

There are no plans for any jollities and no friends will be called on. But as I don't have any, that is no surprise.

A bottle of wine and a fuzzy television will be the order of the weekend.

How times have changed.

In the not too dim and distant past, these next few days would have seen me load the car with a crate of cheap - yet strong - lager, a couple of bottles of cider, tent and instant barbecue and head off to Glastonbury. Oh and don't forget the toilet rolls. Never forget the toilet rolls when going to Glastonbury.

This year I will settle in front of the television in relative comfort and be content with watching edited highlights on BBC2.

It would be easy to blame such a transition on getting old. How, at nearly 30 (just 14 months to go folks), rolling around in the mud is not the done thing.

But age is not the reason why I stay away. Glastonbury - a bit like Christmas - is just too commercial for me.

I was a fresh-faced 16-year-old when, in 1990, I first set foot on the fields of Shepton Mallet, watching a shambolic Happy Mondays stumble through their set to the bemusement of middle-aged hippies. (It wasn't until a few days later that I realised it wasn't Shaun Ryder who bemused them. Every act that graced the stage was greeted with the same blank expressions.)

Although the festival was already huge, it was still something of a secret. Television cameras had not yet infiltrated the masses and everything I knew of it had been through word of mouth. Legends had been created and passed on in hushed tones and had I not seen it for myself, I would never have believed it.

Not many of the Sunny Rochdale massive were too enamoured by the idea of finding out for themselves, and in the end only three of us boarded the coach (none of us could drive in those days) armed with the necessities.

To say one's eyes were opened that weekend would be an understatement. I had created my own image of Glastonbury, but I had no idea what it would actually be like. The place was absolutely huge, with thousands of tents dotted on the grassy landscape. And although Sunny Rochdale had its fair share of the weird and wonderful, the people who converged in Somerset were of an altogether different breed.

Never before - or since - had I seen a middle-aged man naked, apart from a fetching top hat, cycling through a host of concertgoers. The fact that he had gone to the trouble of spraying his spindly frame with red, gold and green paint was the icing on the space cake.

The following year Glastonbury was cancelled but I was first among the fence-jumpers when it made its return in 1992. By then the media had got savvy. Although it was only Channel Four that made the brave decision to take Glastonbury to the public, the secret was out.

The next year saw the BBC jump on the bandwagon and soon Glastonbury was full of 'rebellious' teenagers who had swapped their Take That T-shirts for ones bearing Nirvana slogans.

And when Jamie Theakston started presenting it, it was blatantly obvious that the real Glastonbury was dead. In its place was a bloated Radio One roadshow where supposedly alternative acts like Robbie Williams wowed the crowds.

This year Rod Stewart will be appearing and while it is right to say he has done his fair share of timeless classics, his creative zenith was in the 70s and he has been in rapid decline ever since. In 2002 he is nothing but a name from the good old days of yesteryear, when he actually meant something.

Perhaps then it is apt that Glastonbury should be his playground.