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The middle day of a 3 day festival is always a little odd – like the eye of the storm. You’ve had a day to get used to your surroundings and adapt a little and there’s still a full day afterwards. It’s hard to remember life in the real world and your return is still a way off. Although at 5am the whole place still seems really busy, the roasting hot sun heats the occupants of their neat little boil in the bag tents so they emerge from them like hatchlings at about 10. And thus starts the day – foraging for food and stimulants, punctuated by the sights and sounds of anything from a band to wrestling ladybirds.

Our first bit of live music comes from the bandstand – not quite sure who it was but their lyrics including the mesmerising chant of ‘a fat Bob Dylan and a fat Nick Cave, a fat Bob Dylan and a fat Nick Cave’ we left them singing about A Pocketful of Straws without breaking our stride. Not sure why but it made us think what life in medieval times was like, some crackpot turning up in your village and singing in the middle of the square – back then they would probably have put them in the stocks and chucked overly ripe vegetables at them and, you know, that would have been much more fun. That fate was something I would have gladly seen happen to The Lightning Seeds, sadly remembered more for their Three Lions rather than the beauty of songs like Pure – they seemed to capture the jingoistic element of the world cup that was something we’d gladly left behind in the real world. Their lad songs seem so dated when you listen to bands like Beach House, the harmonies from their Park Stage gig drifting over everyone and re-capturing the balance of the setting again.

The four acts we saw in the next two hours perfectly summed up the sheer breadth of what was on offer – The Wurzels who’s West Country musings on cider, farm machinery and, well, cider again were as uncomplicated as possible. The ruddy faced yokels cut through any pretentions and the inevtiable singalongs flowed like the apple based tipple they are so obsessed with. Within yards Glastonbury veteran Billy Bragg was living up to his reputation as Barking’s answer to Woody Guthrie. Only he could take a 17th century anti Jacobite marching song and update it into a stirring call to arms for the blank generation.

What kind of music had we not seen? Well, if Dublin based female fronted, tattoo driven rockabilly had been brought up Imelda May ticked the box with a set that will have brought her at least a thousand new fans. Ten times the audience at the end of her set compared to the start and by far the most dancing yet seen, some of it landing the perpetrators to the nearest St John’s ambulance post.

With so many bands playing it’s almost a numbers game that someone you know will be on and one of our recommendations on the Zavvi blog, MAY68, had been hand picked by the BBC Introducing stage and showed everyone why they are hot tips for the future. It’s a little pastime of ours to see which bands we reckon will be playing on the bigger stages in years to come and perhaps even headline – the most famous practitioners of this, Coldplay, were taking a year off from global dominance, so we had our radar set and the reaction given to The National pointed towards such earth straddling greatness. These 6 Music darlings gave the performance of their lives and showed why everyone is bowing before them.

By this stage we’d got to thinking that a good old singalonga-camped-up-blow-out was what we needed and surely nobody does this quite like The Scissor Sisters (well, The Pet Shop Boys spring to mind but they were on straight after). Jake Shears’ gang had been out of the limelight for a while but the limelight is where they function best so, even with quite a few tracks from their upcoming album they got the collective festival ass a-shaking. When Ana Matronic announuced that they had chosen a lucky audience member to sing the next song with them, you could have knocked many people down with an ostrich feather (of which there were plenty) when the campometer hit boiling point as Kylie Minogue took to the stage – the gasp from the crowd and the performance on their collaboration was hard to match over the whole weekend.

From the knockabout fun of them Scissor Sisters it doesn’t get much more serious than The XX – just three black clad static bodies and two white X’s lit up the stage but what they lacked in pomp they made up for in breathtaking beauty – perhaps another possible for moving up the ranks by the time next year rolls around. The Dead Weather was a bit of one for the Dads, their plodding pub rock not a million miles from what would have been drifting across the fields 40 years previously. A quick dash to catch Jamie T was the most worthwhile sprint of the day – his disciples hanging off his every word and spitting back every syllable of the likes of Stella and Stick n Stones. If young master Treays is the energetic young pup of music then the Pet Shop Boys are two faithful, reliable old hounds – but ones that have won crufts in their day. Only Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe would keep their normal arena stage show for a festival slot – upwards of a dozen costume changes, 200 cardboard boxes, modern dance and roadies dressed as lab technicians. Their relentless barrage of greatest hits sounded as good as ever. Not surprising as the whole set had been given a spruce up by Stuart Price and sounded as relevant as anything Hot Chip or the electro young pretenders were doing. Their sense of humour was never far away and the sight of Tennant in ermine robes, sporting a crown for the most amazing cover of the weekend – Their own Domino Dancing morphing into Coldplay’s When I Ruled The World. A cheeky nod to when The Pet Shop Boys were the chart kings or just a brilliant take on someone elses song. The 40th birthday no more poignant than when Dusty Springfield flickered onto the screens for their duet on What Have I Done To Deserve This. Still only midnight, it was off again to the bit on the map that claimed ‘Here Be Dragons’….