Rock The Moor
Anyone who follows me on the social networks will have seen the stream of photos appearing throughout yesterday of my family and our friends at a music festival – the children's first music festival.
Our day began at 11 when we left the house armed with enough food for a small army, and a box of glow-sticks that W magicked from somewhere or other. We packed blankets and coats just in case, but thankfully the weather gods smiled on us.
Pulling together so many memories is difficult.
The queue into the venue became a part of the experience for the kids – their complaints of “we're NEVER going to get there” were forgotten as soon as the queue started moving. It took perhaps half an hour to cover the half a mile to the entrance, and then a race to grab some ground strategically in sight of the stage, and close enough to the various kids rides, bars, and stalls to make exploring easy. By pure luck the family that pitched up behind us had a huge flagpole – we really need to get one of those; it became our beacon throughout the afternoon and evening.
One by one our friends arrived, and we set up a kind of small encampment in the middle of the crowd. I met several people that I only knew from the internet, but somehow missed meeting others while either being dragged in ten directions at once by the children, or dancing like a lunatic with W.
The kids got to see a huge variety of stars from the 1980s. Owen Paul, Brother Beyond, Five Star, Bananarama, Howard Jones, Midge Ure, Tony Hadley... (there were others, but their names escape me). It was interesting to see who still “had it”. Of everybody there, Midge Ure, Howard Jones, Bananarama, and Tony Hadley easily stood out – some of them were perhaps better even than they had been 30 years ago (Howard Jones in particular was outstanding).
As the sun fell, the lightshow started, the main stage filled with smoke, and the audience of thousands became a silhouetted sea of waving lights. I immediately grabbed our eldest as the opening bars of “Through The Barricades” started up, and ran through the crowds towards the main stage. We ended up about 100ft away, where I hauled her onto my shoulders (I'm not quite sure how I did it – I had been carrying all three of our kids at various times throughout the afternoon and evening, and was pretty much finished). She sang, she waved her arms, she screamed, she whooped, and we burned an indelible memory into her head.
As we walked back in search of our family in the dark, she hugged me... “that was AMAZING!”.