Countless festivals now bill themselves as child-friendly but are they really? HANNAH DAVIES took her two-year-old to Kendal Calling in the Lake District to find out
PICTURE the scene. It’s a beautiful summer’s day in the Lake District.
A jazz-funk band are playing backstage at a festival as people chill out with an afternoon drink.
Jealous? I would have been. Apart from the fact that I was 30ft away with a toddler screaming his head off because I wouldn’t allow him to hijack a black bus filled with cool 20-something music business bods.
Thirty minutes earlier we spent a good while scrutinising the forklift trucks shifting bottles of water and cans of lager around the site.
It’s safe to say taking a toddler, in this case my son Otis, to a music festival alters the experience for you.
Previous music festivals I have spent in a pleasant fog of relaxation, beer, friends and enjoying bands – that is when I wasn’t crowd surfing to the rowdier options.
But my previous experiences definitely weren’t family-friendly. Reading Festival (there was no Leeds Festival then) was filled with drunk teenagers slam-dancing, I remember watching a friend getting an eyebrow piercing. You wouldn’t really put it in the family-friendly category.
Still, I have been assured since then that festivals have changed to be all-encompassing events and I was determined to see if this was true.
After a friend pulled out of going to the ultra-family-friendly Deershed Festival in North Yorkshire, I decided on also family-friendly Kendal Calling, just south of Penrith in Lowther Deer Park in the Lake District.
This was a strategic move. My parents have a house in Keswick and were within a 20-minute drive should the worst happen. Which, amazingly, it didn’t. Otis loved going to the festival. I knew it was going to work straight away.
Nowhere else had he been the focus of so many adoring slightly-drunk teenagers and 20-somethings (turns out the festival crowd is not that much changed).
Otis engaged them in balloon fights, bashed into them and grinned at them as they cooed over how cute he was.
“Yeah,” I thought, “but you haven’t seen the tantrums.”
There’s a school of thought when a child is at a festival which runs along the lines of “look man, music appeals to everyone, even the kids get it”.
And it’s true.