Festivals, feared by some but loved by many and Wilderness festival, in Oxfordshire, is so loved that this is my 14th, out of 15 – bad holiday planning meant we missed one, oops! Wilderness isn’t just a music festival; it has always traded on a delicious contradiction: it is both gloriously over-the-top and, somehow, a little life-affirming. What makes Wilderness work is that it never pretends music is the only attraction, but it also never lets the music become an afterthought. The Last Dinner PartyWhat Wilderness understands better than many events is that scale only works when it is balanced by detail. In the end, Wilderness 2026 succeeded because it understood its own identity completely.