Each year the greatest festival in the UK gets bigger and bigger, and this year is no exception

It's difficult to get your head around the scale of Glastonbury Festival, so we try each year to put into context just how big the event is. We ran an article last year (that you can read here) to explain why you can never get to see everything you want at Glastonbury, and it's not a surprise when 2010 brought you 91.85 solid days of entertainment. 2011 has excelled itself and everything has gone up by around 18%. That's a massive increase, and here's how it breaks down:

We are not counting sound checks, set changes, queues, toilet breaks, travelling between stages or anything other than the time that artists are performing, it's just back to back entertainment.

There are 2036 performances (up by 19.97%)  on the 57 stages and areas over the weekend, scheduled to play for:

• 145, 773 minutes (up by 18.26%) or
   
• 2429 hours and 33 minutes or
   
• 101.23 days
   
• That works out at around 9p for every act - down 19% on last year!
  

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

You could do the entire 70 days of the Olympic torch relay when it comes to the UK in 2012. When you had finished the route Sebastian Coe would turn to you, put his arm round you, smile and say "If you could just do that a couple more times that would be great"

You can't buy anything for 9p anymore unless it's a carrier bag, but at Glastonbury you can see Beyonce, U2, The Chemical Brothers, Coldplay and Queens of the Stone Age for less than the price of a Mars Bar (if you'd rather have that Mars Bar, choose any of the other 1600 artists)

If you hired Jamie Oliver he could feed 19,436 people using his 30-minute meals (bosh)

If you do an average of 15 words per tweet, and they take about 30 seconds each you could tweet all seven of the Harry Potter books in their entirety - Four times. You'd end up with thumbs like club hammers ...

At a conservative £10 per band it would cost £20,000 per person to see everything separately

Spending on average one and a half hours to do your weekly shop you could do all your shopping for 31 years. If you used the self checkout this would go down to about 10 (or is that just us?)

If everyone who went to Glastonbury, including people working, oh, and press, bought Oxfam, Greenpeace and Water Aid a pint as a donation it would generate £750,000. If you lined them all up from the Pyramid stage it would stretch for over 12 miles, right up to Cheddar Gorge

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.

View the Glastonbury Lineup in full here.

If you want to compare this to last year, click here.

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