Glastonbury 2019: Saturday's best moments

If you’re watching Glastonbury at home on the telly, seeing sunkissed faces and reflective sunglasses and feeling heavy with envy, be reassured: Glastonbury in a heatwave is an endurance event. It’s fair to say that everyone spent much of the middle day of the festival trying not to feel too hot, or too tired, while queuing for water and assessing whether to believe that the supplies were running out (they weren’t - a scurrilous festival rumour).

Whatever the weather, though, Glastonbury remains one of the greatest places in the world, and so the unlikely and the magical unfolds even in a heatwave. Here are the highlights from around the site on Saturday.

1. Yesterday, at 9.56am and seemingly unannounced, the Red Arrows flew over the site in formation, very low, with their red, white and blue smoke plumes in full flow. The sky was crystal clear and it was beautiful. JH

2. After a short night’s sleep in a hot tent, I was delighted to get hold of a pint-sized cup of coconut water, laden with ice. Consider my disappointment, then, to find it mysteriously swiped by the person sat next to me (in a rare, shady corner of the site). Being dehydrated and marginally crotchety, I was about to take this up with them, before realising that my neighbour was Tilda Swinton, and returning to the bar. AV

3. In the baking heat, a group of four loonies persisted with their homemade traffic cone costumes, big yellow and white person sized conical outfits, plonking themselves down together to ensure No Parking at Janet Jackson's Pyramid stage set. They were still maintaining the road rules by the Park Stage deep into the night. NMC

4. Sometimes at Glastonbury you see a reasonably unknown act who is completely fantastic. US singer-songwriter Fantastic Negrito, who appeared on the Other Stage at lunchtime, played an update of the Delta Blues. It was weird, funky, funny and full of energy. The small crowd grew and grew. JH

5. As temperatures soared to 31 degrees, two men dressed as Captain Scott and Lawrence Oates from the 1910 Terra Nova Antarctic expedition staggered, snow-blind, across the Circus Field. Tethered together by a rope, they were wearing the full seal-skin gear and carrying a huge battered Union Jack, their faces leathery with frostbite. I repeat, it was 31 degrees. JH

6. At the Killers headline set, a group of girls - who wouldn't have even been born when the Smiths broke up - reacted with untrammeled delight to the arrival of Johnny Marr onstage to play 1983 single This Charming Man, hugging each other, dancing and singing every word. Great music lasts forever. NMC

7. The beauty of Glastonbury’s enormous site is that it’s impossible not to encounter other sets as you wend your way to your destination. I wasn’t that bothered by the Chemical Brothers, having seen them a fair bit and knowing what Saturday night dance sets at the Other Stage can consist of. But as we emerged by the sneaky cut-through at the side of the stage, the juddering beats of Go, their 2015 hit which acted as an appropriate Glastonbury anthem (“Oh, no time to rest / Just do your best), emerged from the speakers. We couldn’t help but stop and dance. Nor, it seemed, could Zoe Ball, who was pulling some shapes next to us. AV

8. In the middle of the night, I stumbled across a silent disco, just as they broke into song, several hundred unison voices joining in a chorus of Teenage Dirtbag, singing along with a record no-one watching could hear. NMC

9. NYC Downlow. The first thing you see is the steam rushing off the dilapidated windows of a Lower East Side warehouse, men patrolling the side of the building in bondage gear, boy butchers, drag queens, and then a snaking queue of hundreds of blue felt moustaches, lit up by spotlight. This is Glastonbury’s most immersive new art installation courtesy of Block 9, taking revellers back to the Eighties into New York’s notorious Meatpacking District, where BDSM subculture is burgeoning. But if you want a slice of the action, including brilliant queer performances and sets from The Black Madonna and Erick Morillo, you better have packed your blue moustache. EH

10 . In spite of being so secret it didn’t make the programme, word of Mark Ronson’s five-hour-long Club Heartbreak set had spread well over the course of the weekend. By some small miracle (namely being up in the Park to catch Hot Chip’s headline set), we snuck in just as security closed the gates. The clue is in the name: tears-on-the-dancefloor sadbangers, to offer a balm and a beat to those who have ever been scorned. Ronson had promised guests, and everyone was hoping that Miley Cyrus, who will take to the Pyramid Stage on Sunday afternoon, would appear to sing Ronson collaboration Nothing Breaks Like A Heart. Alas, it was not to be. But Annie Mac’s warm-up for the fella himself was a riot of vitriolic disco. Robyn’s Dancing On My Own, of course, was the best bit.