Thrills and spills at the Big Chill

Lucy Amos buys a tent and takes five year old daughter Maggie to their first-ever festival together…

So, I somehow managed to find myself age 31 and a festival virgin. Well, that’s not strictly true, I did attend the V Festival about six years ago but as a guest I was put up in a swanky hotel, ferried to-and-from the festival, hung out in a free bar and watched the bands from the comfort of elevated seating. This time I was doing it “properly” and with my five-year-old in tow.

The reason that I have never felt the urge to get festival’d up before was mainly the camping thing. Having done my Duke of Edinburgh’s Award age 15, I cried because my tent leaked and my hiking boots got muddy and it was not an experience that I had ever been tempted to repeat. However, on a whim I accepted the last-minute challenge of taking a friend’s family ticket in the attempt to prove that I am now a proper grown-up who does things like whisking their family off to a festival on a whim. My partner however did not seem to share my enthusiastic view of our potential image-change and stated that taking our rather high-maintenance (where does she get it from?) three-year-old daughter, Biba would not make the experience an enjoyable one and flatly refused to come. Still, determined to rise up to the now mountainous challenge of attending my first festival on my own with a five-year-old, I bought a tent, borrowed some sleeping bags, packed our bags, crossed my fingers, ignored the warnings of my seasoned-festival-going-friends and left at 8am on the Saturday morning.

On arrival it turned out that my ticket did not allow entry to the lovely Green Family Campsite (serene, clean and in no way mean) and we were directed to the guest campsite, located between the enormous and noisy Purple campsite and the second largest – Revellers – stage. Still, that was OK, I had brought earplugs.

A note of warning, camping alone with a five year old is all well and good, but five-year-olds are not particularly handy when it comes to lugging camping equipment about and erecting tents. And it had already started to rain, bucket loads. Fine, I had bought an umbrella, which my daughter sat under shouting out useful commands such as “It’s a bit too raining mummy”, “you’re getting soaked”, “your hair’s going funny”, you get the gist. Adding to the humilation of the episode was the group of men sitting in the warm and cosy comfort of their tents drinking beer and watching the impromptu side show: me struggling to stamp tent pegs in using my converse trainers (I would recommend taking a mallet, I am rocking some impressive purple bruises on the soles of my feet).

So my tent-erecting premiere was a success and elated we dumped our stuff inside, ate crisps, waited for the rain to subside and went off to explore. Turning up on the Saturday I was gutted to have missed Massive Attack and Thom Yorke who had played the night before and was surprised at how quiet and calm everywhere was considering most people must already have been there (I didn’t realise that festival peeps aren’t interested in anything occurring the wrong side of 12pm). This made more sense when I was reliably informed that The Big Chill crowd is getting younger every year with the majority of attendees this year hitting the 18-25-year-old mark which is not always the most child-considerate range of ages. Having said this there was certainly no shortage of grown ups and there were lots of other kids around to play with, I’d say the ratio of families to non families was 1:12.

It took us about an hour to circumnavigate the site which was made up of four large and obvious stages and about 10 smaller hidden-away stages with people I had never heard of playing an array of interesting sounds, all surrounded by what I understand to be the usual array of fast-ish food stands (none of which served kid sized portions) and festival stalls with a few supermarkets and bars thrown in for good measure. The Enchanted Garden area hosted a spa, hairdressers and an assortment of treatments and massages which looked particularly tempting considering I was sure I had dislocated my shoulder single-handedly lugging all our baggage from the car earlier.

The most interesting area to us however was the creatively named Kids Area which although at first glance did not look particularly inspiring held a baby and toddler area, was home to a kids pizza eaterie, the Boutique Babysitting service and an impressive timetable of back-to-back shows and workshops which made it almost impossible to drag an excitable child away from. However, the freedom of being just the two of us meant that I didn’t have to. So I didn’t. During our 48 hours at The Big Chill Maggie had her face painted (twice), learnt how to street dance and hula-hoop like a pro, painted a wall, made an alien, a space ship, a kite, two peg dolls and a pizza, took part in a kid’s parade, took in three puppet shows and a circus workshop and I sat and chilled watching her have an obscene amount of fun whilst listening to the likes of The Magic Numbers and Paloma Faith resonating from the main, Deer Park Stage. It was truly blissful.

The only daytime bands that we actually tore ourselves away from the Kids Area to watch were Morcheeba, who we watched whilst sitting on the grass, eating our Sunday lunch; Newton Faulkner and Norman Jay, all absolutely child-friendly and brilliant to have a perfect view with your arse firmly planted on the grass. You could even hire industrial strength kids headphones to protect their little ears from the onslaught. We also managed to take in Kelis and Plan B (sacrificing M.I.A) on one night and Lily Allen on the other, although because their sets started at 22.30 Maggie infuriatingly fell asleep on my shoulders after only three songs on both nights. One benefit of being so close to the Revellers tent was that I was able to take Maggie back to our tent and listen to the entire Plan B set from the relative comfort of my bed. Not having my partner there to palm my child off to so I could mosh was probably the main drawback of attending the festival as a single parent. However it also forced me to bed at a reasonable hour each night, which was a blessing in disguise having spoken to countless parents who were close to passing out because they had stayed out partying and then found themselves being woken up by a screaming kid (not necessarily their own) at the crack of dawn and were unable to recover. I guess the advantage of not staying in the Family Camping area was that everybody stayed in bed until lunchtime and the only time we were woken up was when somebody tripped over one of our gui wires and fell on top of our tent at 1am. Ouch.

Other surprises included inadvertently sitting next to a group of 18 year old girls who were overtly snorting a banned substance at 12.15pm on Sunday afternoon during the Norman Jay set. Fortunately, I am a pretty laid back parent, which you generally are if you are considering taking a child to a festival, and I just moved, but it did make me realise that you have to be prepared for some uncomfortable questions due to some frankly pretty bizarre behaviour. For us this also included a lot of painted naked people wandering around thanks to a Spencer Tunick art project, a group of girls dressed up as pairs of tits, a group of boys dressed up as johnnies, lots of people who obviously had no control of either their gurning faces or their own legs and some atrocious language (even worse than my daughter heard while I was stamping the tent pegs in) “mummy, what’s a c***ing f***” “It’s a very, very naughty person, darling”.

However, in my opinion kids have short memories and a few minutes of discomfort were worth the total joy that I could see on Maggie’s face for the entire 48 hours we were living it up at The Big Chill. Having originally planned to leave on Sunday afternoon we were having such a ball we stayed until Monday and witnessed some amazing end-of-festival fireworks and a sky full of chinese lanterns, it was truly beautiful.

So, would I recommend going it alone? Not only am I completely proud of myself for overcoming my fear of camping and losing my festival virginity on my own but seeing how much my daughter got out of the experience was truly intoxicating.

 The Big Chill 2010 is now my most treasured memory.

• For an alternative report, check out Joe Venables’ review here.