Help, I've accidentally taken two kids to a music festival
Festival fun with the family, banjos, and logistics - embracing the chaos and creating new memories.
As you read this email, I’ll be experiencing the first day of Green Man festival in Bannau Brycheiniog (the region formerly known as the Brecon Beacons) with my partner and two kids. We’ve been three times before, but only once with a child – doing a festival with two of them is going to be… an experience.
“Festival Matt” isn’t really that different from Regular Matt. I’ve tried wearing novelty hats, but my head is too large for most of them to fit. I’m not cool—or young—enough to stay up all night raving on illegal substances. I’ve walked past the yoga tent at Glastonbury a couple of times, but the bloke wandering around asking if I wanted to go to his “sexology” class tended to put me off.
The first time I went to Green Man, we wandered into a folk music workshop and I made the fatal error of assuming I was destined to become a banjo player. It’s an easy mistake to make: I could already play the guitar, and banjos are tuned to an open chord, meaning that when you strum it, it sounds just like a banjo. Soon you’re picking out the notes for Dueling Banjos and wondering where this five-stringed, drum-skin-bearing instrument has been all your life.
It didn’t last: once I got home and bought one, I half-heartedly tried to learn all the complex fingering styles and “rolls” and quickly realised I didn’t have the energy to learn a brand new playing style. But this is what festivals do: they lull you into thinking you can reinvent your whole persona on the strength of a brief, probably-not-sober experience.
A festival of logistics
We used to go to festivals on public transport, which still boggles my mind. I wish I could say it was a commitment to travel in an eco-friendly way and “leave no trace”, but it was just because I couldn’t drive and we lived in London where nobody owns a car. I still have mild PTSD when I remember racing across Paddington station concourse clutching rucksacks, trolleys and coolboxes full of beer to try to make it onto the next train to Castle Cary (the closest station to Glastonbury). We carried all our stuff by hand from the coaches to the campsites in the heatwave of 2017 and nearly got heatstroke doing it. These days, we travel by car.
We took Ted to “Glastonbury” when he was two in 2021, and the festival was cancelled. They held a “family party” over the summer instead, during that weird time when we were emerging from lockdowns but still unsure how to mix with people. There were no bands but plenty of kid-friendly performers, food trucks and activities. We got to stand on the set of the Pyramid Stage in the pouring rain and try to work out where we were standing when we stood there in years past watching Radiohead, Dolly Parton or Craig David.
Festivals are transgressive spaces, or at least progressive ones: you’ll probably be exposed to some weird, offbeat stuff, and they’re all the better for it. Kids should see things that confuse or challenge them on a regular basis, in my opinion – and a bloke dressed as a robot locked inside a wooden box dancing to songs from the TRON soundtrack will do just that. When we took Ted to Green Man aged three, he saw a parade of mock-government ministers handing out satirical free “money” to the crowd. Who knows what he made of it, but he certainly wasn’t seeing things like that at nursery.
My big fear with this week’s festival experience is logistics: moving two kids and all their assorted accoutrements is a big undertaking, especially coming after a long drive through hilly Wales. We’ll inevitably forget some essential item and have to buy it again from the overpriced festival shop. We’ll probably briefly lose a child in a crowd, or get accidentally pissed at 2pm on festival-strength cider and leave the kids staring at a tablet while we doze under a shady tree near the comedy tent. It’ll be fun, though!
I’ll no doubt return tired, aching and stressed, but hopefully with a refreshed perspective on life and a brand new thing to obsess over for at least a couple of months until I realise that I don’t have the knack for woodcarving, will never be able to play jazz flute, can’t braid my hair or don’t really understand Urdu. But for a few brief moments, a vision of a new me will shine—Festival Matt—and I’ll enjoy it.
Mini-feels this week
Hand-me-downs
I gave away an old bike this week which I bought during lockdown to take my son to nursery. It was my first time riding with a child on the bike and I was nervous about falling off and taking him down with me, but we never had any issues.
As he got older, the child seating changed, and soon he was too big to comfortably sit behind me – we recently upgraded to an electric bike where he can sprawl on the open seating behind me, and my knees and back can take a breather from trying to ferry a five-year-old around like a tiny emperor.
But I felt a pang of sadness all the same when I cleaned the bike up, ready to donate it back to the shop I bought it second-hand from. We’d had adventures on this bike, near-misses and wobbles. I have another kid now who could sit on it again with me, but I’ve upgraded to all-electric and there’s no going back.
I hope another family will get the use of it that we had, and experience the simple joy of moving along on two wheels – it’s the only way to travel. Just give me a motor too, because I’m pushing 40.