I'm getting old. Aptly, this isn't news. It didn't hit me when I turned thirty, when I thought it would. It hit me when I realised it's nearly eighteen years since I was eighteen. I've been an adult for as long as I've been a child. Meanwhile, a whole fresh crop of people have become young adults, trotting on the earth's surface, wearing the same clothes as my babysitters and their boyfriends did. Wild.

In my twenties, I got to go to Glastonbury - twice - with the same group of good people. We stumbled upon our anthem the first time around. An outfit called Icona Pop, who weren't at the festival that year, had released the catchiest song with a chorus well-suited to sloppy shouting. Always desperate to make a gag, I swapped the lyric, "I LOVE IT!" with an equally triumphant, "INDIFFERENT!" It went down well, forging both an in-joke and an anthem that we repeated on our second visit, full of the authority that a previous Glasto experience afforded us. When some of us became teachers, who couldn't get the time off, we stopped going. It just wasn't fair to go without our original crew. We swapped notes about the subsequent line-ups on announcement day. Who we'd have liked to see, who we were baffled by.

Recently, I've been watching a lot TV from the 90s set in London. There's so much flow in those languid shots that last longer than a fraction of a second. Everyone's smoking and incredibly sexy. It's a city I recognise. There's barely any billboards or advertising, rendering the streets clean and smoggy all at once. In Dennis Potter's posthumously-produced 1996 magnum opus, Karaoke, everyone mimes along to old songs, while the dying writer at its centre is attacked by visions of real people uttering the dialogue meant for his characters. It's taken him his whole life to understand his writing is reportage of what he heard in his head, which he, in turn, got from listening to the world. An eternal feedback loop.

A couple of years ago, it was time for our first ten-year Glasto reunion. Hosted in a lovely garden, the coverage played on a screen inside the house as we sat on camping chairs round a roaring fire. Some of our number had married, some of our number had died. We barely paid attention to the coverage, didn't know the majority of acts. I chain smoked. We wouldn't go back, we cried, even if we were offered tickets. Sleeping in tents would be no good for our collective spines. Besides, going in a time of contactless and live streaming? We got to go in the golden slice of time where smartphones existed but cheap, widespread portable charging did not. We carefully calculated how much money to take out so we'd avoid horrendous queues for the cash machine. We wound up our disposable cameras, slapped watches across our wrists. The sprawling site became its own limited-edition world, the grass beneath and the sky above cultivating a million moments to be in.

Cold Lazarus, the companion piece to Karaoke, also from 1996, "is set in the 24th century, in a dystopian Britain where the ruined streets are unsafe, and where society is run by American oligarchs in charge of powerful commercial corporations. Experiences are almost all virtual, and anything deemed authentic (such as coffee and cigarettes) has either been banned or replaced by synthetic substitutes". A group of activists try to fight back. They call themselves RON - an abbreviation for Reality Or Nothing.

"I LOVE IT!"

I watch Charli XCX on demand, at 8am on a Sunday, from my bed. There's no risk of someone filming and blocking my view, or not having personal space, or doing my best to dodge clouds of skunk. She puts on a phenomenal show, visceral and intellectual, like all the best pop music. She moves in the same way as the idols we both grew up with, her skull-print scarf whipping this way and that in the force field she creates. She dedicates her song about parental dynamics to her nepo baby pal. I vibrate at the sight of her, so glad that she did drugs and wrote songs about doing drugs so that I can listen to those songs and feel like I'm doing drugs without having to do drugs.

Hovering above my memory-foam mattress through the sheer ecstasy brought on by sound, amidst all this noise and nostalgia, headlines snap me back - where? To earth? To reality? Why should the spirit of the site be stuffed into broadcast? For my comfort? For these consequences? Pictures or it didn't happen. I draw the duvet closer round me, immobile, feeling anything but indifferent.

I guess you had to be there.