And the forecast for Glastonbury is... very muddy

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The forecast for the music festival is rain, more rain and thunderstorms.

As the gates open at the Somerset site on Wednesday, fans can expect light showers, followed by heavy showers the next day.

By Friday - when the festival officially begins -there will be driving rain with thunder and lightning.

And the forecast for those staying home is no better, with deluges expected in London.

Glastonbury is often a mudbath, because of the number of people churning up the fields that are home to thousands of tents.

But the four-day festival is expected to resemble a battlefield more than ever this year -perhaps even topping the chaos of 2005 when 300 tents were washed away in floods 14ft deep after a month's worth of rain fell in two hours.

The organisers think they have the situation under control, however, having spent £750,000 on engineering to improve conditions.

Drainage will be more effective as hundreds of yards of piping has been upgraded, while 6,000 tons of hard core - crushed rock and gravel - were laid to create a coach park.

The area in front of the Pyramid Stage - the festival's main arena - has been dug up, the topsoil removed and thousands more tons of hard core laid down, before replacing the soil again to raise the level.

A record 180,000 people will attend Glastonbury this year

Michael Eavis, who set up the festival 37 years ago, said: "Deep mud is quite dangerous. It's something I'm always concerned about because it's a huge responsibility. We don't want people slipping and becoming crushed."

In 1997, after some of the worst weather in the festival's history, the Other Stage started to sink into the earth and emergency shelters were bused in.

Festival-goers are being urged to leave behind their tents to be reused in disaster zones around the world.

The Give Me Shelter project hopes more than 1,000 people at Glastonbury will drop off their camping equipment at a dedicated stall to be sent to Botswana and Sri Lanka.

In 2005, 3,000 tents were abandoned at Glastonbury.