Festival ingredients

It is festival season at the moment. G and I are big festival goers but for reasons that I can't now recall, we decided to have a year off in 2007. Since the line ups were published, the tickets went on sale, and Millets have started selling gorgeous floral Orla Kiely tents I have come to regret that decision.

It does mean that I have spent some time prowling around the internet looking at the sites of festivals I might like to go to next year. Some that have caught my eye are The Port Eliot Literary Festival , The Secret Garden Party , The Cambridge Folk Festival and The Latitude Festival as well as two I have been to before and greatly enjoyed: The Big Chill and The Green Man.

So feeling wistful, we organised a small festival of our own, along with some old friends. Planning where to go and what to bring along led me to wonder about what the ingredients are for a good festival. Here is the list I came up with:

• a picturesque venue
• camping
• a well-stocked bar
• music that is good to listen to outdoors
• good friends
• children's activities
• tasty food
• wholesome toilets (you'd never catch me at Glastonbury - much better on the tele!)
  

We called our festival the iPodival 2007. We all brought along our iPods, with playlists we had put together specially for the festival, and took it in turns to play them on some portable speakers. We chose a campsite in West Sussex that let us pitch where we wanted and play music late into the evening. It also let us have a campfire, and had enough streams, trees, fields and ditches to keep the children entertained.

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All the ingredients on my list were there - and the sun even shone on us. We had such a good time that I think the iPodival will now become an annual event, even when I have tickets to one of the bigger festivals as well.

PS. With thanks to David for the top photo - which was taken at The Big Chill a few years ago.