It may seem a long way off, but thoughts are starting to turn to next summer’s festival season, with a number of events offering early bird tickets. The latest to do so is Cornbury Music Festival, which takes place at Great Tew, from July 8-10.

Tickets for the gathering, lovingly nicknamed Poshstock, go on sale at 9am tomorrow for £140 (£165 with camping) – compared to the full price of £170 (£200). There are cheaper tickets for children and the over-70s.

If you have serious money to spare, director Hugh Phillimore is inviting Cornbury-goers to become festival life members for a one-off payment of £5,000 – which gets you six VIP tickets a year (worth £1,890 a year). If that’s a little steep, you could still join the Poshstock family by signing up as a festival friend, for £100 a year (earning you a 30 per cent discount on eight tickets, saving up to £480). There are also deals for festival patrons and partners.

For details go to cornburymusicfestival.com

* Certain gigs go down in history, with those who were there smugly reminding those of us who weren’t, what a great thing we missed.

One of those gigs was the 2001 show by The Strokes, who were, at the time, the hippest band on the planet. Fans crammed into the former Zodiac included Kate Moss, Manic Street Preacher James Dean Bradfield and members of Radiohead.

Now one of the Strokes, Albert Hammond Jr, is coming back to the venue, in its present guise as the O2 Academy Oxford. And, he tells us, he has special reason to be excited to be coming back as a solo artist on Monday. He said: “I lived in Oxford for a few weeks when I was younger. I feel in love, you know.”

And does the artist – son of the 60s and 70s singer-songwriter of the same name, remember the excitement of that Strokes show. “Yeah, I do,” he says. “ It was a lot of fun.”

But quoting another hip New Yorker, the late Lou Reed, he promises even better things to come: “What comes is always better then what came before,” he says, wisely.