<too tired>insert witty title here</too tired>

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...