Always miss something at Glastonbury Festival? Read why you'll never get to see everything you want, unless you have access to a Tardis

If you have ever wondered how, regardless of your military planning, you always seem to miss so many things at Glastonbury it would come as no surprise to you that it is simply because the biggest music festival in the world just has too much entertainment for any person to see. But how long would it take you to see it all, or how many people would you need to cover it all in the weekend? We dusted down our abacus to see.

Below are figures for 2010 - See how 2011 stacks up here.

We looked at this year's full line-up as of 19/06/2010 and are only using performance time, so it is purely based on watching the entertainment, not the sound engineers, so there's no travelling between stages or queuing. Here goes …

There are 1697 performances on the 49 stages and areas over the weekend, scheduled to play for:

• 123, 263 minutes or
   
• 2204 hours and 23 minutes or
   
• 91.85 days
   
• That works out at around 11p for every act
  

To put this into context here's what else you could do in the same time:

If you drove steadily at 60 mph you could drive around the Earth 5 times, or from Land's End to John O'Groats and back again 75 times. If you really floored it and got to 108 mph you could get to the Moon

Jack Bauer could save the world from terror 92 times, for 46 different Presidents

Paula Radcliffe could run the London Marathon 881 times, or 840 with toilet breaks

A competent typist could tap out Hamlet, Shakespeare's longest play, 123 times

You could sit and watch twenty three whole World Cups, without missing a single game, that's every one since it started right up to 2026

You could fill your 8gb iPod Nano with music and listen to it from start to finish, eight times

If you burned every performance onto CDs and stacked them in their cases on top of each other it would be over 18m (60ft) high

If you only used one kettle to make tea you could brew enough cuppas for every person at the festival, or the entire population of Oxford.
If you added a custard cream for each person you would need 1.68 tonnes of biscuits

So next time you kick yourself for missing your favourite band, don't be so hard on yourself, that's just Glastonbury, the biggest and best music festival in the world.

Do you have any comparisons to make? Add them below.