Festival reviews

Many of my friends are shocked when I tell them that me and the girls are spending nearly every weekend until the second week in September at a festival... 'What?! you are taking your girls to a festival?!!'
Yes that's right, they are putting on their neon face paints and glitter and coming along with me! 
I'm not a drug taking raver who gets completely wasted and misplaces the children oh apart from that one time... just kidding!!!

My girls are pretty brilliant, they love listen to music especially when it is live, they like to dance and they love to learn about different cultures, all things they will get from going to festivals!

So I thought I would write a little review of the festivals I enjoy taking my children to and the ones I would never again set foot in, and it might then give you the inspiration to take your children to weekends away where they will definitely find new memories to take home with them. 

Larmer Tree Festival, nr Salisbury on the Wiltshire/Dorset border.
www.larmertreefestival.co.uk

This is one of the most family friendly festivals you can go to! 
There is a whole area for children and all the bands are family friendly, there is so much to see and do. The grounds are kept spotless with people collecting the litter and emptying the many bins frequently, and the toilets are probably the cleanest you will get at a festival!!
There is a family camp site, a quiet camp site and general camping, with toilets and showers in each field and plenty of taps with running water.
Last year Katie from Cbeebies did a show for the children which was brilliant, there is a night time walk you can do through some wooded trees with lots of lights and ambient music.
If you want to start out at a festival this is the one to do although the children's tickets are pricey, at other festivals you just pay a booking fee where as at Larmer it is half an adult ticket.

Gorgeous sculptures in the Larmer Tree gardens.

One of the stages in the Lamer Gardens

Festibelly, New Forest music festival, Lymington
www.festibelly.com

This was a very small but cute festival. There was a special tent for children to spend time either alone or with their parents. 
There was a varied selection of bands which was good but they had not planned for the amount of people who went to the festival!! The toilets were grim to put it mildly, there were no toilets in the camping field let alone showers so you had to walk back to the festival if you needed the toilet and the water tap kept running out so there was no water to drink most of the time.
This was nice to take children to as it wasn't hectic although there wasn't that much to do.

My girls love to get involved!

Secret Garden Party, Abbots Ripley, Huntingdon
www.secretgardenparty.com

NOT FOR CHILDREN!!! I bought tickets for my children but at the last minute they were given the chance to go away for the week with my dad - thank goodness!!!!!!!!!
There was no break from the pill heads and dance music mixed with a large amount of miscreants! 
There were however lots of amazing sculptures and art works around the grounds and they did have a children corner in the grounds for children to do things but really this was not for children I wouldn't have felt relaxed like I do at others, I would want to keep hold of them the whole time!
The toilets.. there wasn't enough, and they were filth!

Fox sculputure

Paint throwing @ Secret Garden

Could you crouch above this to do your wee?

Square Fayre, Worth Matravers, Purbecks
www.squarreandcompasspub.co.uk

This is a very mini festival at a pub called The Square and Compass in the tiny village of Worth Matravers. With lots of music playing all Saturday into the night this is only good for children if they can entertain themselves, mine enjoy making loom bands whilst also making new friends, it is literally in the pub garden over looking fields and the sea. 
There isn't a camp site attached to the pub but a short walk through fields and you get to Western Dairy campsite which have toilets that smell of lemons and are so clean! 
They also have a small hut that sells BBQ food, breakfast baps in the morning and ice creams! A really chilled out weekend as long as the weather is good, best to go with a group of friends with children!

Right by the seaside, absolutely beautiful surroundings!

The Wilderness festival, Cornbury Park, Oxfordshire
www.wildernessfestival.com

This is great if you really want to immerse your children into true festival spirit. There is a huge range of music, sculptures, beautiful grounds and the toilets have got better this year, when they decide to work there are showers and water points.
There is a babysitting service that you need to prebook before you go as the places get filled up pretty quickly. I paid for two nights worth of babysitting but ended up only putting the girls in there for a couple of hours as I felt they were missing out.
There is a whole family section with fun things for kids to do all day and lots of things all around the festival to see and do to keep them entertained. Even at night there are parades and bonfires to see which my girls loved.
You can go swimming in the river there, there really is so much to do!
However the journey from the car park to the campsite is a long and arduous one and you need to either take your own trolley or hire one when you are there.

We have the Purbeck Folk festival, Bardic picnic and Festival number 6 to do. 
Larmer Tree is always the best every year!

Why you should always use a tracking device when you go camping...

So this years festival season is in mid-flow and having already been to 5 in the past two months, I think I'm doing pretty well.

As a family we have had many 'experiences' during our festival times, none stands out more than the time last year when, 'mummy lost the tent'!!!!

We, (me and my two daughters) had arrived at the Larmer Tree Festival, near to Salisbury, and we were very very excited! 
The sun was shining and so were the faces of everyone in the field, we could tell this was going to be a good weekend. 

For the small sum of £10 you could get a lift with all of your belongings in the back of a trailer attached to an electric bike, ridden by an extremely cheery man raising money for charity, what he didn't know was just how much stuff we had brought with us.

As there was no way I would be able to trek the tent, the girls and all the 'essentials' girls need at a festival, i.e. headdresses, feathers, outfits for all occasions and lots and lots of glitter, on my own this seemed the perfect idea and the best way to start the weekend!

We travelled the way to Quiet camping like princesses in a carriage and excitedly got out of the trailer, accosted two random strangers and convinced them to put our tent up, dumped all the bags into the tent and raced off to see the bands!
That night we left earlyish so we could have another late night the following night. I felt good, we had seen lots of amazing bands, made lots of new friends and I had successfully taken the girls to a festival alone! 
I was completely prepared with a kinetic torch so it would never run out just like Bear Grylls would have done, which meant we would be able to find our tent. Or would we? 
In the delusion that nothing could ever go wrong as we are at a festival and the sun is shining we had not, OK, OK, I had not looked, to see where the tent had been put up?! 

We were searching using the torch that I then realised shone dimmer than a glow worm under a duvet and no amount of winding the wheel made it any stronger , in other words you could barely see a foot in front of your feet!  Suddenly our calm up and down the paths in the field turned into frantic tripping over guide ropes and coming to the realisation that if we didn't find the tent pretty soon I would be giving up and we would have to sleep in the car! I did know where the car was parked right?
Finally 35 minutes later and we literally 'bumped' into two security men. 
'What do you do if you think you may have lost your tent?' I said in a jokey, carefree voice trying to disguise the panic and embarrassment I really felt.
'You just need to go to every tent until you find it, what does it look like?'
'What does it look like? What does it look like? What sort of a question is that?! Its a tent.....'
I then realised that actually I had no idea what it even looked like, I didn't know the colour or any outstanding features and this whole situation was getting worse and worse.
'It has a little picture of a fire on the side and its green,' said Daughter no.1
'Well I'm not entirely sure of that!' I replied laughing like it was absurd that a tent would have a picture of a fire on the side and isn't she precious thinking that it did....!

And so that was it, that was the time that me and the girls walked up and down nearly every tent in the whole of the Quiet camping field at Larmer Tree festival with two burly security men until we came to, yep you know it, a green tent with a small flame retardant picture of a fire!!!! 

Is that a catheter in your pants or are you just happy to see me?!

Blogging has taken a massive back-step over the last month due to illness, in fact everything has stopped in its tracks.

I never would have thought that after a minor operation my bladder would have just stopped working due to a reaction to the anaesthetic, especially as I am only 28 years old and pretty healthy!

I've had the worst month of my life, I can't remember the last time I had a proper nights sleep without getting tangled in tubes through the night as they wrap around my legs when I toss and turn. 
AndI have never wanted to sit on the toilet and do a wee like normal as much as I do now!! :( 

Instead, if I want to go out of the house I need to plan what to wear so no one can see a large plastic bag hanging from my leg, which slowly fills up with urine without you even noticing! 
It's been much better for me since the weather has got wet and chilly, I can wear a flowing dress with leggings underneath and you can't see anything until I sit down and the bulge is more prominent. Last week when it was super hot it was a nightmare, no shorts or short skirts for me so I just stayed away from human life rather than roast in leggings and a top!

This will kind of give you an idea of what I am dealing with right now......

Attractive right?!!!

Has anyone thought about designing a clothing range for the catheter concious?!! If not there is definitely a niche in the market that must be filled! I've seen that people have designed pretty bags for the catheter bags to go into but that isn't what I need,I need a long dress with a built in bag and tubes that lie flat when you sit down preferably with a sense of invisibility about them.

I was invited to the seaside to stay with a friend to have a break from this month long mentally and physically draining problemo, then I realised just what I would have needed to pack for the short trip.... it then just didn't seem worth it until I was better!

I do try and think about the positives I have found a genius way to use any leftover bags when I am better!!

Genius!!

21st Century girl

'But MUUUUM everyone else has one, why can't I?!'

Mobile phones and children... at what age should a child be allowed their own mobile phone and why?

My eldest daughter is 10 years old, and it has come to my attention that mostly all of her friends have a mobile phone and yet I am still adamant that she is too young to have one...yet. Is this me being cruel and mean as she suggests or am I doing the right thing?
Nobody teaches you how to raise your children, there is not a set guideline to follow, so I just seem to follow my gut instinct, and in this situation I don't feel paying out for a mobile phone is worth it.
Don't get me wrong, there have been plenty of times that I have wanted her to have a phone handy, (mainly on a Saturday morning so I can text her asking if she could bring me up a coffee in bed!), and yet I still haven't budged and we have managed to get around the situation.
This whole phone epidemic has only come to fruition in the last 15 years or so, and before that I'm pretty sure we all survived without a mobile phone. Surely kids nowadays can handle it too? 
We have all become far too reliant on these mobile devices, hoping that they are our children's safety nets in times of trouble. Many of them have full access to the internet, in my opinion it is far more unsafe to have a smartphone than to be without one.
It's not just mobile devices we don''t really 'do' in our house, game consoles are another no go, I'm not about to share the one television in our house with a 'gamer'. My thinking is if you don't have a game console then the children are more like to play outside in the fresh air than sit all day 'gaming'.

If your child is playing out with unlimited access to the internet on a smartphone, then there is no one to check at what they are looking at or who they are talking to.

I came from the generation of the first 'chat rooms'. I was talking to a whole range of strangers and now I look back at this I can see how dangerous it was, how the information I was giving out about where I lived and who I was could have been used against me for the worse, now technology has come so much further I want to protect my children from that for as long as possible. The media is full of stories about children being cyber bullied and I don't want this for my child.

It's not like my daughter is not given the freedom that other children with phones has, she is, she knows to call me from the house phone of a friend's when she gets there to let me know where she is, and she follows the boundaries set out for her when playing out. And guess what?, she manages all this WITHOUT the use of a mobile phone!!!! 
When she plays out with friends she's not texting or googling, she's being a child and that is what she needs at 10 years old. 

I'm sure there will come a day that I think she is old enough to have her own mobile phone, but for now I'm just happy she's out playing with friends and being a child.

Am I old fashioned in the way that I think? Probably!

tumultuous, adj.

tumultuous

adjective, characterised by noise, disorder, commotion or uproar.
Marked by a violent turbulence or upheaval, highly agitated, as the mind or emotions; 
distraught; turbulent. 


neurotic behaviours of both parties mixed with his inability to provide enough affection to sooth the wounds = flogging a dead horse.....

Yarn bombing: Bristol

Yarn bombing, yarn storming, guerilla knitting, kniffiti, 

urban knitting or graffiti knitting;

a type of graffiti or street art that employs colourful 

displays of knitted or crocheted yarn or fibre.

Photos by Mark Rodgers

Is there an area near you that could do with a little warming up with colour, texture and style?

natural instinct

Age gap or age cavern? and where do you draw the line?

The late Anthony Quinn was 81 when he impregnated a 19 year old, Tony Randall was 75 when he married his 24 year old wife and Playboy founder Hugh Hefner married his third wife who is 60 years his junior. 

So... you've fallen for an older guy, you are in your late 20's whilst he is early 40's and you realise, although the age gap isn't so bad now, give it 20 years time the difference might just be more prominent. You could still be hard at work whilst he's queuing up at the Post Office to collect his pension, and that's when reality checks in. Or does it?

Yes my boyfriend is older than me, fifteen years to be precise, but I'm no gold digger, if you saw me you would realise I'm not exactly 'arm candy', and I don't have daddy issues, so why am I so attracted to a man much older than myself?

Other than the fact he is the most charming man I have met for a very very long time, he is utterly gorgeous but more importantly...why is he interested in me?

Most women will admit that they want a strong man who can stand his own ground. Back in 'cave man times', this meant the man could feed his family and protect them from predators. 
Women are now taught to be independent, we can pop to the shops for our food and if we need protecting we can always call the Police, however, you cannot change human instinct, human nature, and as a woman I still want a man to be big enough and strong enough to wrap his arms around me and protect me for what life throws at me. 
He can do more than that.

Real women want more from a man than 'just a fling', they want experienced, unselfish lovers in the bedroom, they need the respect and appreciation they deserve, and in my experience this is usually only found in men over the age of 30. An older man isn't into 'playing games', he's been there and he's done that.

He has more life experiences than me and with that comes a better understanding of relationships. It turns the usual conversations into something better balanced and it makes a big difference in how we relate to one another compared with other relationships I have been in.
So actually I'm not worried about what the future holds for this relationship, I can always put him in a home if he gets too much!!


Other gorgeous over 40's out there who you wouldn't think twice about dating!!

Gerard Butler age 45

Hugh Jackman age 46

Johnny Depp aged 51

Russell Crowe aged 50