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 By that she meant at least 50 years out of date, i.e., classic rock ’n’ roll.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.
I probably would have caught the last five minutes had not Freddie, my three-year-old, demanded a wee. I sprinted towards the Portaloos clutching him like a rugby ball, only to be confronted by another queue. When our turn arrived Freddie took one look at the toilet bowl and refused to go anywhere near it. ‘Yukkie,’ was his verdict.
Having missed Tom Jones, we made our way to the children’s area. As I schlepped along behind carrying two-year-old Charlie I was overtaken by a man pulling two children in a cart. ‘Where did you get that?’ I asked. ‘We brought it with us,’ he replied. ‘It’s a bit of a pain in the daytime but it really comes into its own at night.’
So that’s what festival-going couples do with their children at night. They pull them along in a cart. Caroline and I, being avid devotees of Gina Ford and her Contented Little Baby Book, were shocked. Shouldn’t small children be tucked up in bed by 7.30 p.m.? Not for the first time that day, we felt very square.
The children’s area was rather sweet. Charlie and Ludo, our five-year-old, engaged in some Women in Love-style mud wrestling in the Greenpeace tent, while Sasha coloured in a card and mailed it to her best friend at the Pixie Post Office. Caroline sent me into the woods with Freddie, instructing me not to come back until he’d relieved himself. Easier said than done considering there were CCTV cameras everywhere. Indeed, no sooner had I pulled his trousers down than a couple of security guards appeared and ordered me to pull them up again. In the end we found a suitably secluded ditch, but Freddie’s attempt to do a ‘standing-up wee’ resulted in both of us getting rather wet.
For a 46-year-old man, the most depressing thing about Latitude was the sheer quantity of beautiful young women. Wherever you looked there was some long-limbed goddess dressed in little more than a handkerchief. Insofar as they noticed me at all, I was the starey-eyed bald bloke with a wet patch on his trousers. (‘I couldn’t borrow that handkerchief for a second, could I?’) It didn’t take long for Caroline to pick up on this. ‘Stop perving,’ she said, as my head swivelled left and right like a gun turret.
Not sure we’ll be going to any more music festivals this year. Like Latitude, several of them are billed as ‘family friendly’, but most of the other dads looked at least ten years younger than me. The Last Night of the Proms is more my speed. And I’ll be leaving the kids at home.
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