Like John Lewis in a field

3 weeks since the festival and still feeling mentally and physically scarred! Very very mild post traumatic stress disorder I'm sure, my dreams seem to be working though all the stuff that my brain couldn't process at the time. When I get back in the van I have a slight feeling of dread.

But hey, we've survived. Not made a bean as it turns out, but not lost a load either, apparently good for a festival in it's first year. So next year we need to be able to at least pay ourselves but we've learnt rather alot as you might imagine.

And on the whole, for our first attempt it went very very well, but for some reason neither Kate nor I seem to be able to fully appreciate what we have achieved.

As far as we know nobody locally has complained about it and quite a few didn't even notice it was on.

We did piss a few people off, destroyed and replaced some borrowed marquees which didn't stand up to the wind (never again.) Luckily we concentrated most of our incompetence on one company, Taylor's of Harrogate. They had very kindly given us free tea and coffee to sell and all the gubins to serve it. In return we forgot to use their branded cups, lost their sugar shakers and boxes and father-in-law ran over and flatened one of their coffee perculators. Marketing lady from Taylor's was well annoyed and there was nothing we could say to make it better. So we have vowed never to do such a thing again. We have enough people to keep happy without pandering to the wants of some random marketing department.

Next time we have to go longer than just one day and get the most of the infrastructure, and charge more. The festival was really cheap this year, really really cheap. We know this because we've tried to find a family festival in August and we can't find one where we can get the family in for less than £250. We could of got our family into Deer Shed Fest 2010 for £90, so we can increase our price a bit and pay ourselves for the bother and still be good value.

Don't know what to do with this blog now. No one wants to read about a finely tuned festival machine do they?! ;)