Festival Madness

Groovy Baby

The skies are grey, rain is in the offing, so yes, it is that Music Festival time of year. Last year we took little Cassie to her first music festival and she slept blissfully through most of it looking very cute indeed in her pink ear defenders. This year I am guessing she will be a little more active which means that Gramps and I will be struggling to our feet from the picnic rug more than we are used to. Let’s hope the old knees, ankles and backs will stand it!

Forty years ago Gramps and I went to the very first music festival ever to be held in the UK. The Isle of Wight decided it could be the Woodstock of England. So off we went wearing our loons, tie –dye-three-button-t-shirts and leather sandals which smelled so strongly of the camel urine they had been cured in. It didn’t matter though as the smell of patchouli incense and weed was so strong that nothing could penetrate it. Fifty thousand people descended on the Isle of Wight and we all looked exactly the same! (Although it became apparent as the weekend progressed that some of the crowd, the ones with suspiciously short hair, big boots and Alsatian (sniffer) dogs were not, perhaps, as ‘laid back’ (daddy-oh) as the rest of us.)

The sun shone, the music was great, the weed was weak, and people made love not war, and when a press helicopter started circling overhead whilst the acoustic folk group, Pentangle, were playing, fifty thousand people rose to their feet and gave it a two fingered salute. God did we feel powerful – flower powerful? This was the sixties baby and us middle class rural baby boomers were taking a tiny sip of the elixir of the Age Of Aquarius!

No worries that weekend about the damp grass affecting the rheumatic knees! The funny thing is that it only seems a few minutes ago that those happy hippy young things were gramps and I. Make hay while the sun shines kids, life is short but it can be great!

Granny Bloggins

Festive Functions

This time last year I wrote a post about how I had lost my Joi De Vivre - we took Cass to her first ever music festival and while I was supposed to be being a cool and laid back Mummy all I did was worry about her eating and sleeping, and yes of course, pooing. I felt that perhaps I was never going to get my groove back and that maybe this was what motherhood was; a constant feeling of anxiety about the little midgetty person, just enough so that you never really relaxed and enjoyed yourself. Well, the good news is that that passed quickly and this year, I knew that when she needed to sleep, she would sleep, if she was hungry she would eat and all her other bodily functions would be just fine.

And indeed they were. While the music was great, the food overpriced (and as is so often the case at festivals, disappointing) and the festival atmosphere jovial, my favourite moment this year did indeed feature a bodily function. Sorry, I don't often do a post about poo, but here it is.

Apparently one of the top reasons that people list for avoiding festivals is the loos. I get that. Portaloos are not glamorous and don't exactly provide the leisurely experience of the home porcelain. Lucky for Cassie, she isn't potty trained (God forbid, she is only 17 months) and so had no issues with that.

So my resounding memories of this years festival will be my child backing up into a big hedge that she had located in order to do her job of work. Imagine the scene; a grubby little cherub, her tog suit pretty much muddy from head to foot, with bright pink ear defenders on, nuzzling (if you can nuzzle with your backside? does that make it buzzling?) backwards into a huge bank of shurbs, squatting and then doing the face. You know, the face. And pretending she is on her own by not making eye contact with any of the people passing by who were chuckling because they knew the face too.

Brilliant. What I like about motherhood is that every new phase gives you something new to enjoy, some new moment to cherish and some new challenge to work with, and so I think we might have to make this festival post a yearly event - what will be next year's festival 'Kodak Moment'?

The Mummatron