Is your festival hall-full or half-empty?

Michael Eavis is looking on the bright side, flagging the decision to start selling Glastonbury tickets in autumn as a success. The festival spokesperson trills:

[John] Shearlaw said he had not expected the tickets to sell out so far in advance.

"That would have been extraordinary, without a line-up and eight months before the event," he said.

"You can look at it from both sides because if they had all sold out, there would have been eight months of turning people away.

"We are very calm about it - it's a vote of confidence."

Oh, yes - how businesses hate the idea of being so popular they've sold out and have to turn people away. Just ask the CBI, they'll tell you that the more warehouses a company has of unshifted stock, the better things are. If only they'd sold no tickets at all, that would have been perfect, as nobody would need to worry about finding the tickets had sold out.