Friday night and I am staring at my trainers, which are caked in mud. For the first time ever I decide to go back to the car and put on wellies for a festival. It is still daylight, but black clouds are roiling and boiling overhead. There is the distant thump of bass-heavy music and a long queue for me to pick up my wristband to gain entry to the site. I am, I consider, perhaps too old for this.

Perhaps an hour later I have indeed exchanged my ruined shoes for my wellies and I am esconced in a fair approximation of a Northern working men’s club, complete with pints, notices on the wall naming members who have not paid their subs and announcing a forthcoming charabanc trip, and suitably cheesy music from the stage. And all’s well with the world.

I am at Beat-Herder and have realised that you are never, in fact, too old to go to a festival. More than that, Beat-Herder has just become my new favourite festival ever, in the world. It is, we all agree over several beers, better than Glastonbury. And that’s saying something.

I haven’t been to a proper festival, mud and beats and falafel wraps, for a long time. I spent most summers in the Nineties at such events. But then Glastonbury got all big and Radio 1-ish and you had to apply for tickets as though it was the Olympics and I sort of lost interest.

But now I have discovered Beat-Herder. This is what you might call a boutique festival, which takes place in the no-man’s land between Lancashire and West Yorkshire, organised by a bunch of absolutely sterling folk from around Keighley.

Beat-Herder is like all the best bits of Glastonbury that I used to enjoy so much, far away from the main stage where the big-name band du jour was pumping out their latest album. Beat-Herder is like all the fringey, vague, fuzzy bits of Glastonbury, except that they are the whole point of Beat-Herder.

And it’s so friendly! People walk around, smiling and nodding. And nary was heard a discouraging word, and the sudden scraps that often broke out at Glastonbury or Reading were completely absent.

It was, in short, a bit like coming home. And more to the point, my all-time favourite band, Orbital, were playing on the Saturday night. My earlier misgivings about the mud and being too old for this sort of thing were wiped out as I stood in that crowd with other old farts like me having a most agreeable time.

It was good to get back to reality, of course, to wipe off the mud and appreciate afresh the embrace of my family and the comforts of a shower and a bed. But Beat-Herder was, in a word, brilliant. I have one request for you, though: Don’t go next year. I wouldn’t want it to get too popular, now that I’ve found it...