Summertime, and a trip to a ‘family-friendly’ festival beckons

24 July 2010

Toby Young suffers from Status Anxiety

It’s the summer and that means the festival season is upon us. I say that as if I’m a veteran of the festival circuit when, in fact, the last one I went to was Hood Fayre (sic) in Totnes in 1980. That was the year I took my O-levels and I remember sitting in a tent, sucking on a Camberwell Carrot, when I bumped into my History teacher. ‘Shouldn’t you be revising?’ he said. It won’t surprise you to learn that I failed everything apart from Eng Lit.

Some 30 years later, I decided to dip another toe in the water. Caroline and I were offered a free day pass to Latitude last Sunday, the annual Suffolk music festival, and since we were going to be in East Anglia anyway it seemed like a good idea. Conse-quently, at 11 a.m. on Sunday morning we strapped the four kids into our red minibus and beetled along the A12 to Southwold.

‘This is your sort of music,’ said Caroline as we emerged from the car park, referring to the noise in the distance. By that she meant at least 50 years out of date, i.e., classic rock ’n’ roll. ‘Hang on,’ I said, straining my ears. ‘It can’t be... it is. It’s Tom Jones!’ I immediately placed a toddler under each arm and started running. This was too good an opportunity to miss. Tom Jones! I had no idea he was still alive, let alone performing. Things were looking up.

Unfortunately, before I was allowed into the main arena I was under strict orders to get the children some lunch. That wasn’t a problem for the boys — they were happy with burgers and chips — but six-year-old Sasha wanted a vegetarian crêpe. (She’s her mother’s daughter.) That meant standing in a queue for 20 minutes, by which time the septuagenarian sex bomb was into his first encore.

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