Some of you will know that it sometimes takes me a while to
get round to things. Friends and colleagues
don't expect an instant reply to emails.
It has been known for them to experience up to three weeks of 'satellite
delay' before I reply to an email with the answer to a question they'd, by now,
forgotten they'd asked. Regular readers
of this blog will have noted that, although I had planned to write a Christmas
message in December, I've maintained radio silence since November ... and it's
now February. In a similar way, I love
magazines but have a particularly thorough and long-winded way of reading them:
when I buy a new magazine I like to
browse through the whole thing, making sure I don't miss any of the more
'newsy' items, before filing it away for a more careful reading of the features
at some point in the future. That point
can be several months after publication, when I revisit and relish the whole
magazine at my leisure. Goodness knows what
would happen if I were one of that dying breed who take a daily newspaper.
One of the magazines I enjoy is called Songlines - (a world music magazine that's published eight times a
year, and covers music from traditional and popular to contemporary and fusion.)
And so it was, in January, that I came
to be sitting in Worcester's oldest pub, The Cardinal's Hat, finally reading Issue
102 (the August/September issue) of Songlines. Here, at last, I read Matt Milton's fantastic
piece about going to music festivals when you're a parent of young children. Matt, evidently, was a regular festival-goer
in his youth and writes, with great verve and wit, about his disdain for
family-friendly festivals (because festivals
shouldn't be "orderly, comfortable things.") He describes the moment
when he looks down and realises that the young child at the festival he's complaining
about is his own. Now, unlike Matt, I
had never been to a festival before becoming a parent. I had my children when ... well, when I probably
should have been going to festivals. And
I didn't experience my first festival until my kids were old enough to attend
festivals without me. I told you it takes me a while to get round to things; the
first festival I went to was in 2011 (when I was touching 50.) The festival was
The ArleyFest in Worcestershire and headlining was the amazing Seth
Lakeman. (I wrote about it in the blog, see
August 2011 - A Musical Summer).
I loved Matt's
description of the dubious joys of taking a baby to a music festival but I don't
think I'd have enjoyed my first festival half as much if I'd had my kids in tow.
Matt's right, though, when he says parenthood is, in some ways, a good preparation
for festival-going; when you are used to "being spattered with mucoid substances
and Guantanamo Bay levels of sleep-deprivation", as he says, rain, mud and
dodgy toilets are no big deal. I quite
fancy Shrewsbury Folk Festival this year, and now my kids are grown up, I can
pretty much please myself.
