Iceland’s kings of heavy metal Momentum are launching into an assault called “The Creator of Malignign Metaphors”. It’s broad daylight and they’re playing about 10 meters from the kitchen window of a suburban-looking house. The stage is sited on an AstroTurf football pitch, with one of the goals pushed to the side of it. On the opposite side, kids are shimmying down a blow-up slide. Very little about G! conforms with the standard festival experience.

Way up in the mountains of northern Italy sits a small spa town called Porretta Terme. For many visitors it is the resort’s healing waters that brings them here. Yet for others it is the healing music – once a year the Porretta Soul Music Festival is held across the second to last weekend in July. Here veterans of American soul music take the stage, often performing their only European show of the year (and, sometimes, many years).

Can this really be only an afternoon’s travelling away from traffic-choked London? I’m waist-deep in wild blue lupins on a verdant Swiss mountain looking for a concert hall.

Following the three home-grown opera productions, in come the visitors. And so we come to the “other” Figaro, the one by the 18^th-century Portuguese composer, Marcos Portugal. This being Buxton and the visiting company being Bampton Classical Opera, fellow-travellers in reviving neglected later 18^th-century works, Mozart would be just too, well, common. It’s not all that long ago that we had the “other” Barber of Seville, the Paisiello version here.

I have to be honest - I didn’t go to very much of Nova. Suffice to say I’d put my name down to review it and then fate threw a house move into the mix in the same week. Nevertheless, relatively undaunted, I planned to head down to the Pulborough site in West Sussex, only 20 miles from where I live, taking my two daughters along. Then I lost my driving license. And then it started raining and didn’t stop.

No sooner had the Olympic torch been run out of town than in rushed the cavalcade of opera singers, musicians, actors, dancers and literary talkers for the start of the 34th Buxton Festival. Leading them, so to speak, was Stephen Barlow, the new Artistic Director. Nothing daunted, he decided to take up the baton for the opening night.

Brand-free, eschewing sponsorship, and letting kids in for free, the Hop Farm Festival in Paddock Wood, Kent, has risen steadily in stature to become one of the major fixtures on the UK festival circuit. If the festival is young, most of its audience and stars are of a certain age. Last year saw Morrisey, Patti Smith, Lou Reed and Manu Chao headline, while Prince played his only UK show there.

Bob Dylan once described himself as ''just a song and dance man''. If the phrase was intended to debunk our veneration of him as the voice of a generation and to imply that he's just an old-fashioned entertainer in the great showbiz tradition, devotees have never believed him and have carried on seeking clues to the meaning of life in his work, campaigning for him to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and generally treating his every utterance as if he's the Oracle.

Some people go on holiday to relax on a beach. Others to trek through a glorious landscape. Or to explore magnificent architecture/extravagant nightclubs. Myself, well, I’m a musical tourist. Which often means I’m in rather blighted states. I’ve spent more time in Mississippi than New York, regularly returned to Romania yet barely know France. So when the offer came to attend a musical festival in La Réunion I didn’t have to think twice.

To each their own Hay. The Roman encampment that is the modern-day literary festival, circled by pantechnicons and trending in the Twittersphere, looks very much like a monomaniacal content provider for all comers. Astroturf walkways deliver the cagouled hundreds and thousands to events in tents with clockwork regularity. But the reality is, of course, that no two experiences of Hay are alike. A bit like snowflakes.