There's nothing like some high profile national press to oil the wheels of pretty much everything. We had a feature in this weekends Sunday Times Culture magazine 100 top festivals and suddenly regional press and telly are emailing US and the ticket sales take a healthy bounce. Quite how long this will last is of course totally unknown.

A fella from a rather larger and more established festival in the North emailed today after reading the article. The email contained the offer of help and advice and general good vibes - I wonder how long we'll remain friends, but we festival organisers all seem to share the same problems.

We're going to have loads of swingballs at DSF. In order that the quality of the festival is not judged by the quality of it's swingballs we decided to test some. Below is what happens to an £8 swingball set in 5 minutes if you work from home, getting steadily more wound up and feel the joy of cutting loose in the back garden around tea time.

Argos do one that doesn't fall apart and we'll have lots of those. I did break the tedium for the staff in Tesco today by buying 20 hula hoops and have them all fall off the conveyer at the till.

So, footie trip to Barcelona resulted within an hour in the loss of my wallet on the tube, a 2-2 draw against the team of Spanish air traffic controllers and on the whole a great weekend despite the early hiccup. Believe everything you hear about Barcelona petty crime and then some. I apparently came close to scoring with my first touch but I don't remember it like that myself.

Onwards and hopefully upwards...

It's been the hardest two weeks so far, and it's pretty much all been down to difficulties booking bands. I lost it at one point and the word 'divorce' was mentioned. Not since Kate and I went kayaking in Florida and we inadvertently drifted into an allegator infested swamp, and I 'slightly' lost the plot, has Kate had to use such shock tactics.

DSF is new and untested and partly due to our committment to be kid friendly, slight uncool perhaps compared to other older, more established and hipper fests. Consequently booking really great bands has been much harder than I thought. But despite this we have finally got a line up we only dared dream about a month ago. Thank you Claire.

I finally feel that we have got something to shout about, and a festival programme that I would find hard to resist. We now have to make sure that everyone finds out about it.

I'm 40 today. The second half (fingers crossed) of my life didn't start very well as I had to go back to bed for a couple of hours nap. This exhaustion was due to a day spent with Andy asking shops in four local market towns to put up our posters in their windows, very tiring for an office bum like me. I was pleasantly surprised how lovely everyone was that day apart from the witch in the Thirsk elderly ladies hair dressers. We also avoided the local carpet mafia who are also staging an event on July 17th and are turning up the heat in the PVC roadside banner war.

The need for a proper van is increasing again, as we speak my Golf has an 8ft bar sticking out the back of it. Our garage owning friend is looking out for a sensible Transit for me. I have however found that VW transporters come with added 'lifestyle' which I shall find hard to resist despite the premium in price.

Only a week until Tuesday night football plays a team of Spanish Air Traffic Controllers in Barcelona. Hopefully a collision free game.