Fajita chicken with Mediterranean veg and wholemeal pitta

This weekend is festival weekend, which means pretty much every taxi driver on the Island is busy carrying festival-goers to and from the site. That turned out to be a problem when we had an emergency – the tv listings magazine wasn’t delivered! – and I needed to get a ride down to Tesco before mum’s panic overwhelmed her.

(She uses it, I think, to orient herself in time, which makes her panic make slightly more sense: if she’s relying on a piece of paper to tell her what day and time it is, and that piece of paper is suddenly no longer there, it’s not entirely surprising that she gets scared and confused.)

Thankfully our kind neighbour gave us a ride down to the village. They didn’t have mum’s favoured magazine but I got her a different one, and so the ’emergency’ was disarmed.

And that’s about it for today, event-wise, so instead I will talk about the festival itself.

The first Isle of Wight Festival was held in 1968, but the most famous one was in 1970, at Afton Down in West Wight: I can see the site from the front of my house, although of course it’s long since reverted to being nothing but a hill. The festival, featuring just about every act of that era you can think of, was quickly overrun: contemporary accounts put attendance at 250,000, while modern estimates suggest maybe 700,000 people crammed into a patch of hilly farmland. (By way of comparison, there were just over 140,000 people living on the whole Island as of the 2024 census.)

To prevent a repeat, the following year Parliament passed a law banning overnight gatherings of more than 5,000 people on the Island, without gaining a licence in advance from the Council. And that was the end of the Isle of Wight Festival until it was revived in 2002. It has run every year since, with the highest attendance figures – in the mid 2010s, when I stopped going because it was far too crowded for me – no more than 58,000. Which really puts into perspective just how many people there were at the 1970 festival!

(If you ever happen to be on the Island and want to know more, there’s a fascinating permanent display at Dimbola Lodge Museum in Freshwater Bay with photos, contemporary accounts, and related artifacts. The rest of the museum is dedicated to Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, who is an interesting person in her own right. There’s an excellent tearoom, too.)

The first Isle of Wight Festival I went to was in 2004, with my sister, where we saw, amongst others, The Who and David Bowie. The following year mum came too, and the three of us went several more times, collecting Mountbatten sunflowers for mum every time. The photo we used on my sister’s funeral programme was taken at the Festival, with my sister posing with one of the sunflowers in her hair. (She was generally more inclined towards the Goth style and mentality, so the pose was more than a little sarcastic!)

Even now, driving past the festival site (now Newport, the main town, a more suitable location than rural West Wight) provokes memories: watching Keane from the top of the big wheel, trying to dance in muddy wellies in a 1940s-themed bar tent, my sister pulling me through a crowd so I didn’t have to open my eyes and risk triggering a panic attack, drinking tinnies of beer in the queue to get in when their owner realised he couldn’t take alcohol in with him so instead distributed it to anyone who wanted one.

A favourite memory, from the earliest festival I went to, when things were a little more innocent and laidback than they are now, was a security guard at the gate asking a young man if the stuff in the plastic capsule on his necklace was cannabis. The young man admitted, rather sheepishly, that it was. The security guard looked at him incredulously and said “you’re not supposed to say yes, you idiot!” and waved him through, stash intact.

Yeah, definitely more innocent times!

Perhaps because I know the Festival is happening only a few miles away, with people drinking and dancing and generally having fun while I handle magazine-induced anxiety attacks, I have been feeling rather down today. I try my best to avoid thinking about how my life has changed in recent years, as breaking down in tears of despair isn’t a good move for a carer, but on days like today I really do miss how things used to be.

Ah well: nothing to be done about it now. 🫤

---

We had a grocery delivery today, which meant a wide range of food to choose from in cooking dinner. I opted for fajita-inspired chicken tenders, coated in a mix of breadcrumbs and crushed tortilla chips. I thought they were really nice – properly crispy outside, tender and juicy inside, with a pleasant spicy-but-not-hot flavour. Mum is in complaining mood so I’m not going to ask her what she thought, but she ate them so she can’t have disliked them too much.

My only complaint is that the pack of chicken was labelled ‘serves two’, and contained five pieces of chicken. If you’re going to make food to serve two people, please put in an even number of whatever it is!

And so to an evening of mum stuck on a permanent loop of telling me all the parts of her body that hurt. Interestingly, earlier this evening she was complaining about not getting any help with some medical issue. I asked her which issue she was referring to, and she couldn’t remember!

Complaining is obviously becoming a habit, and I am therefore going to ignore it for the rest of the evening.

Well, I’ll try, anyway.