We all have times like the one I’m living through now where the long-awaited freeway of summer turns into more of a twisting path. By the time you reach midlife you’ve had a few of them… which makes it easier in one way because you can be confident that there’s a smoother surface somewhere, further round the corner. However you’re also aware that misfortune will rear its discomfiting head again and so I’m noticing that as we grow older with that knowledge, the challenge is not allowing cynicism to set in. And I don’t mean that as a throwaway comment. So today’s post is about a deliberate decision that we took in the midst of a lot of life stuff to go where joy lives. It’s about a day of escape in the sunshine and the way a choice can make a difference.
If you’re not careful, cynicism can really take hold of you in midlife. I remember being full of youth and optimism, bursting with dreams that I had absolutely no doubt that I’d achieve and yet every time I shared them with my parents, I’d get the condescending smile and sharp intake of breath that seasoned midlifers so often can’t hold back. These days I understand their impulse to protect me from disappointment but at the time it just felt like the proverbial pissing on chips. And that’s something we must manage as we grow older, somehow we have to keep on believing in the richness of possibility, even when it feels as if it’s upped sticks and moved on to someone else.
Those of you who’ve been reading for a long time know that there are two times of year that I absolutely love. One is the build-up to Christmas and the whole glorious twelve days of it, the other is just about every day from 1st May, until September starts to loom with the omen of cold days to come. You’ll remember that we had a period of four years when I’d savoured November and December, eagerly anticipating our family Christmas and then each time illness hit us and Christmas wasn’t what I’d hoped it would be. And that’s the problem with honest blogging – when you live through these disappointments you do it publicly and so it feels amplified. I’ve noticed over the last couple of years that I now build up to Christmas with less fervour and I think that’s why. This year I’m going to get my enthusiasm back.
The last few summers have been similar. In our corner of the north the weather is largely miserable and I know you’re all sick of it in the south but just a little bit of hot sunshine would be so welcome up here. It’s grinding hearing everyone complain about it when apart from the odd day, we haven’t taken our socks and cardigans off yet. And of course we’ve been living through bereavement with illness piled on top – and here we are, knocking on August’s door when summer doesn’t feel as if it’s started yet.
I’m telling you all of this because honesty matters. I often share very good times with you on here but it’s important to me in terms of the growing real life friendship that I have with more and more of you through meet-ups, that you see that my life is real and just the same as anyone else’s. I think that’s why we always get on so well when we meet, because there are no artificial barriers, we know we’re all just living our own versions of a universal midlife experience. So today’s post is about actively seeking out joy when times aren’t feeling especially easy. You have to notice the small glimmers and if there’s an opportunity for something bigger, seize it. Like a lot of women I’m working hard to avoid midlife cynicism by not allowing tough times to permeate everything. Sometimes you have to allow yourself some relief from whatever’s going on around you and I’ve learned to do that by compartmentalising.
I’m talking about this today because I know that a few of you are going through bigger things than we are at the moment. And so I’m taking you back now to the post at the beginning of July when I said we were heading down to Surrey for a festival. Somebody close to me had told me that they thought we should cancel, that Mal had too much on his plate to be expected to put it all behind him for a day. They had a point and so Mal and I discussed it carefully but he was clear that he wanted to try and get away from it all for a weekend. I knew that it would go one of two ways. It might be a disaster – we all know that feeling of forced jollity, like being on a merry-go-round with a stomach full of candy floss when everything feels too loud and too fast and all you want to do is get off. That was the risk.
But then again, sometimes just making a decision to shut everything away for a day can work out. If you can set out with the mindset that there are things in life that you just can’t change at the moment but… you can give yourself a day of not thinking about them… then sometimes happiness slips back in and gives you the reminder you need of how good life can be. You have to assess your gut feeling before you go, deep down you’ll know whether you’re just too overloaded with whatever it is that you’re coping with.
So we decided to go to Boogietown and here we were, heading down to London on a sunny Friday morning with a weekend off ahead of us. I wasn’t feeling carefree but I was quietly hopeful.
Dress; Sandals sold out
A segue for hair
My afternoon started with a colour session at Hershesons, it hadn’t been done properly for six months so it needed work. So many people have asked me about how my hair is coloured on Instagram recently that Mal popped in to film some of the process. I’ll talk about it on Instagram soon because my colourist Andre is so skilful in the way he weaves foils with hand painting that I can go for months without the roots ever showing and he explained a little of how he manages that. There’s no denying that colour at Hershesons is expensive but when it can last up to six months, I feel it’s worth paying for the level of skill and creative talent that I get there. I allocate almost all of my beauty budget to my hair as you know, in my cost per wear calculations, it’s worth it.
After the colour I knew I was in for a pretty brutal cut with Premlee because I won’t be down in London again for another nine weeks so it’s going to have to last. It was halfway through here, the structure was just starting to come in and you can see how short he was having to go.
After that we’d had long term plans to have dinner with the eldest and his girlfriend but, the World Cup in America had proved to be a bigger draw so we found ourselves at a loose end. We headed to Waterloo and then on to The Flowerpot in Sunbury where I’d booked for us to stay for two nights. The moment that the Boogietown dates are announced there’s a mad scramble for accommodation and in my hurry, I’d booked somewhere that was less than half a mile away on the map… forgetting the size of The Thames and the scarcity of bridges once you leave London. It wasn’t the easy walk home that I’d imagined but it was nothing that local taxis couldn’t fix. I don’t have any photos but we had dinner outside in the sunny pub garden. It was fantastic to feel the heatwave that everyone’s been talking about and it gave Mal a chance to update me on everything that had been going on in his world of sadmin that week (the sad administration of death). We needed to do that so that we could we could shut it up in a box for the following day.
Festival day
And so here we were the next morning, dressed and ready for what was going to be a baking hot festival.
Halter top; Necklace; Tassel earrings; White denim cut-offs; Belt – this year’s version; Gold bangle stack; Adidas Gazelles with gold stripe (sold out)
What to wear to a festival in midlife
Once again I had lots of questions on Instagram, this time about festival dressing so let’s talk about that for a moment. I’ll start by saying wear what you want, it doesn’t matter, only the very young looked as though they’d spent a lot of time worrying about it. Most midlife women were dressed in whatever they felt they could cope with for a day that would see no shade and temperatures in the mid-thirties.
I had, for five seconds, flirted with the idea of cowboy boots… really only because I have a pair that I never wear. And they would have elevated my outfit in the festival stakes but I saw so many women limping around and throwing theirs off that I’m really glad it was just a mad moment. The thing to remember about a busy festival is that for most of it only your top half is visible so just wear something comfortable on your feet. You know I’m going to say don’t wear rubbish trainers, look for a sports brand and absolutely not a shoe brand or a high street retailer – for the sake of your credibility – but I know a lot of you will ignore me. I’ll never stop saying it though because it’s such an easy win in the style stakes. Trainers carry a simple style code that assigns you as either ‘in the know’ or ‘mumsy’ – you choose.
If the festival is packed and hot it isn’t worth wearing sequinned trousers, glorious though they are, save them for a stadium gig – a hot summer day spent on a parched field isn’t the best time to encase yourself in plastic. I wouldn’t have chosen white denim shorts if we’d gone with a standard ticket because I couldn’t sit on the grass but we’d splashed on VIP so I knew I could head back to the enclosure when I needed a seat for a while.
The top is the thing that matters and it was a bit of a quandary with the temperatures. It had to be natural fibres so again none of the sequins or satin that I’d usually go for. Silk was an option but I wouldn’t risk ruining anything lovely. In the end I found this gold halterneck at Zara, it has a beautiful metallic sheen that doesn’t quite show in the photos. It’s made from viscose which yes, is manmade, but it’s wood pulp so it’s breathable and it felt right.
Here’s a closer look. I added an easy, triple layered necklace, disco earrings which are my latest love… and… can you see my nod to glitter with sparkly eyelashes? I always feel a glitter festival face looks too little girly so this was my nod to it. These mascaras are just brilliant, they’re made from natural ingredients and they stay on all day and all night. You just add a layer on top of your ordinary mascara and it seems to stop that disappearing too. They come from a small, female founded brand in New Zealand so they take a while to arrive but there are lots of lovely colours and people stop and chat to you when they spot the iridescent effect.
Halter top; Necklace; Tassel earrings; Mascara
And the rest of this post is going to have to be more of a vlog than a blog. We tend to get lost in music when we’re at an event like this but we managed to capture a few special moments of video as we went around. And I’ve deliberately chosen clips of the crowd rather than the artists – I’m hoping that they’ll give those of you who haven’t been to a big festival yet a sense of what it’s like to be there. Because live music is so good for you – and hearing it in a crowd gives you a unique sense of belonging as a human being which sounds ridiculous but there’s science behind it.
The science of collective effervescence
I never go to a festival with the expectation of feeling emotional about it but there are so many moments when you find yourself in the middle of 30,000 people, all throwing their arms in the air at exactly the same time, that it feels electric. A good festival gets past all of your carefully maintained defences and releases something magical inside you that a lifetime of buttoned-up British reserve has been locking down.
Back in 1912 the sociologist Émile Durkheim gave this magic a name, ‘collective effervescence’, by which he meant the surge of oneness that comes over a crowd when it moves and feels as a single organism. Neuroscientists have since gone on to prove his theory. When we move in time with other people, dancing to the same insistent beat or singing out the same words, our brains release endorphins and oxytocin – the chemistry of falling in love.
Research on ‘interpersonal synchrony’ shows that moving together genuinely erodes the borders between you and everyone else which is why you can arrive somewhere as a self-contained fifty-something and leave feeling hoarse and sunburnt and weirdly devoted to a field full of strangers. Far from being the daft indulgence that people who haven’t been to them assume festivals to be, it’s actually your nervous system doing precisely what it was built for. It’s reminding you that regardless of age, we were never designed to do any of this on our own. The togetherness that comes with a great musical experience (and often at a festival the experience trumps the quality of the music) almost transgresses humanity, it can feel sublime.
You’ll get a little bit of it from these clips but they weren’t our best moments because of course for those we weren’t filming, we were simply within them. Let me take you around Boogietown with me but first I need you to feel how hot it was. We’d arrived equipped with old fashioned paper fans… the southerners were wearing weird electric fans around their necks that we northerners had never seen before… it was the most glorious weather for a festival day.
So, the first band on the main stage was, appropriately, Heatwave. And it was a bit of a moment for me when they sang this song. When my first husband and I got married, we couldn’t agree on a single wedding song so we had one each. I chose Minnie Riperton’s “Loving You” and he chose this one. Although our story ended, quite literally, in tragedy, there were happy times. This song will always bring them back and I’m lucky that my forever husband doesn’t mind that. We’re both glad of the experience that we brought to our marriage. By the way forgive my singing and missed notes, this just isn’t my pitch.
And of course the great thing about a festival is that there are different tents and stages so when one is changing over, you can hit another one and find something else. This was the funk and soul tent, it shows you how happily the generations let loose together with everybody embracing each other’s joy.
Next there was the joy of Odyssey. You’ll remember how important Odyssey are to us – we went to Manchester to see them last November and they dedicated their concert to us. They’re one of the older bands that are still fit enough to throw out their big, high energy numbers as well as a number of covers like this.
At this point we made a foolish decision. Boney M were about to come on in this tent but we chose to go to the main stage and see The Earth Wind and Fire Experience instead. We nearly changed our minds when en route, we bumped into some of our old London friends going the other way. We should have done because EW&F were awful whereas the general consensus seemed to be that Boney M were the best act of the day. I know my friends will be reading this – and yes, we are still kicking ourselves. Anyway, here’s one of the better EW&F moments. I made the best of it but you can see that the crowd wasn’t behind them.
So we ditched them and landed back in the Funk & Soul tent just in time to hear Alison Limerick blasting out this one. What a woman – she’s so tiny we could hardly see her – but she’s mighty. This was one of the best moments of the day.
There was so much more that we didn’t capture. Shalamar here but we only have a photo. It’s such a privilege to hear the songs you know so well sung by the original artists. Yes some are now having to bring in new members but there’s always an original heart to it. They won’t be performing for much longer so while they’re touring, we’re determined to hear as many as we can.
Before we knew it, the sun was going down and we were reaching the end with all the other tents and stages now closed in honour of the headliner. We had to wait for her for a while but she’s 82 so on a blazing hot day when most 82 year-olds would have been struggling to do anything at all, it was only fair to bear with her. It wasn’t a chore sitting in the warmth with a glass of cold cider… and you can hear my geordie’s sudden “howay then” excitement when they finally announced her…
Who was she? The one and only Gloria Gaynor. Was she everything we hoped for? Not quite. Understandably she did a lot of slow, B-side songs because I just don’t think she had the capacity for “I am what I am…” or “I love you baby…” However she ended the festival with this and gave us collective effervescence by the bucketload. Once again I’ll use the word privilege for hearing this, one of the most iconic songs ever, known by everyone, everywhere, sung live by the original artist.
You WILL survive Mal!
And so we had a wonderful day, and because it was so close to where we used to live it was made even better by bumping into a lot of our old friends and neighbours – and readers and Instagram followers too. We never go to events like this with a group, partly because we like to be nimble and switch from one place to another without any debate and also because we want to lose ourselves in the music together. It really was nice to have people we knew around us though.
I hope this has given you an idea of the experience. And I urge you to put something music related in your diary if you don’t have anything. Do it your way – a big stadium gig, a local cover band, opera, the Proms… but go and immerse yourself in it with others who love the same thing. Do it while you have ears that still hear and legs that still dance. It takes energy to go to a music event but the energy you expend is doubled by what you get back from the collective effervescence. And like Gloria Gaynor, we won’t have the energy forever.
So this weekend I’m urging you to seize some joy from music if you’re going through one of life’s trickier times – and if you aren’t then you have no excuse. Just do it!
