Every festival season, I think about something the writer Nell Frizzell once said to me during an interview about being the child of hippies and being taken to Womad, the international arts festival. She described it as “standing in a field next to your dad wearing a bumbag, and thinking, ‘Oh, I’ve seen enough men from Kazakhstan playing fiddles.’” It never fails to make me laugh, because not only have I lived that experience (though it was my mum who took me to Womad), but because it comically captures that feeling of your parents dragging you along to something that they insist you’ll love when, really, you’re there because they want to be.
I’m still recovering from Glastonbury – my first trip away from my son, and, it turns out, the perfect choice for that purpose, because there was so much going on that I couldn’t focus on worrying about the distance between us. And it turns out that parenthood prepares you well for the chaos and squalor: could I handle very little sleep and quite a lot of exposure to human faeces? Absolutely. Am I inured to unpredictable behaviour, strange meals at odd hours and weird bursts of overwhelming emotion? Also, yes.
