Tent Sniffing for Beginners

I am off to Camp Bestival in the summer and I think each time I open my email there is new and exciting news about what is going on there! I have been a regular there since 2010 and there hasn't been a year I've managed to do or see (or eat) everything I wanted to. But at least I've never been bored! Luckily Camp Bestival seems to have grown with my daughter and they now have a dedicated teen area. If you have never been to a festival and have kids this is a great place to start. i really feel now I won't worry when Dd decided to go to festivals on her own or with mates, she really will be an old hand at festival life! Anyway, on to the news! There are newly announced acts some of which I have heard of and some I have yet to discover (another great thing about festivals is discovering fab new bands without the risk of having bought tickets to a concert! You like them, you stay and listen, you don't and you can find something else!) And in our favourite tent

A small post today. I don’t seem to be out and about much despite the lovely spring weather. But I have had the joy of a lot of wildlife in the garden. We have regular visitors of the usual small birds to the bird feeders, robins (we have one that has learned to hover to get at the seeds), green finches, a variety of tits and also more sparrows than I’ve seen in a while. The ‘less than neat’ borders in the garden attract the ‘rummagers’ of the bird world, so we have blackbirds and the occasional thrush. The robin gets into the undergrowth too, and some plump wood pigeons patrol our lawn. The bid baths (various odd water filled objects, with and without stones in for the smaller birds to perch on) have been popular with even a large crow having a splashy bath in the week. I have seen fewer magpies around lately, but they may be nesting. We have two or three jays visiting regularly though so we are still a popular garden with the corvids.  The squirrels are still enjoying the

Some time ago when bidding on tents on Ebay I 'accidentally' bought two. As one was sort of a spare DD and I decided to try our hand at decorating him (we named him Barry - he is a Bari3 ) We thought that if disaster struck and it all went wrong...well he was sort of expendable. As it turned out painting him went brilliantly , he looked very swanky in his new livery and quickly became our festival tent of choice. He came with us to a fairy festival in Sussex, to Camp Bestival every year since 2010, to Wilderness 3 times, to Wadfest (where his groundsheet was nibbled by a vole! fixed with Duck tape) ...And every time he was admired, commented on and generally loved. As DD and I had signed him (with our twitter handles) we even sometimes came back at the end of the day to find friendly notes slipped in under his flaps... He stood up to the wind and the rain and the sunshine. He put up with me erecting him while I was tipsy on beer and being take down when I was in a h

I thought I'd join in with Throwback Thursday today. Sparked mainly as DD and I were poring over some old photos of festivals we'd been to. So it's not a picture of me, but DD, that graces the blog today. DD declared this her favourite photo of herself at a festival. She was about 6 and it was at Eastern Haze , in 2007, the first festival we attended and the one that got us hooked. A gorgeous summer, with rain and mud, great music, icecreams, drugs (in the air, we didn't partake), light sabres and funfairs. Isn't she a natural hippy?