Canterbury Folk Festival

This year saw the first Canterbury Folk Festival in full swing in the Dane John Gardens over the last weekend in June.  A full weekend filled with sunshine and folk music, in the beautiful parkland setting of the Gardens overlooked by the bandstand where all the acts would be playing from.

All you need for a good folk festival, apart from good music of course, are craft beer and local ales, with fruity finishes and deep malty flavours.  I had the Rocking Robin Robin Redbest ale (the same one that Sally is enjoying below) which was seriously yummy, a light bronze easy drinking bitter made with Kentish hops.  I must admit, for a determined non-ale drinker, I am finding more and more that are quite quaffable!

To keep everything balanced, you also need delicious food from independent food stands, including Wimbledon ready strawberries in pots with lashings of fresh cream, carried around on trays by ladies from Simply Strawberries, duck wraps and duck fat chips, piles of fresh olives and huge containers of pad Thai noodles from A Taste of Thailand.  I had the plantain crisps and chilli balls from Vinngoute, which lived up to the translation of its name.

Music, food and ale is also best shared with a bunch of friends as chilled and relaxed as you are (Ben even more so as Green Diesel would not be playing until the Sunday afternoon, so he was completely off duty). Shay, Ben, Nick, Sally, Ellie, John and I had already arranged to meet by the Bandstand in the early afternoon but we ran into other familiar faces throughout the day who would pull up a pint and join us.  Canterbury is really very small and at an event like this you are pretty much guaranteed to bump into a number of people you know.

Finally, to really make you folk festival experience complete, you need a dog.  The ultimate hipster accessory that every good folk aficionado should not be without.  I should have tied a red scarf around his neck.  Opportunity missed.

James was in Malta with Steve on a lads holiday, and Sasha was visiting her sister so I was dog-sitting Jackson for the weekend.  With James and Sasha's permission, I packed up his water bowl, a litre of fresh water and a bag of dog biscuits and brought him along for the afternoon.  I quickly discovered that if you have a dog at a festival, especially one as large and good natured as Jax is, you very, very quickly make friends with a lot of people who will just come up and cuddle him.  He was like a magnet for small children and mid-30's gruff men who insisted on calling him 'good boy'.  He looked rather bewildered by all the attention, but took it with good grace.

This was the first time Canterbury had hosted a folk festival - Broadstairs and Faversham are the traditional homes of folk around here, but its popularity is growing, evidenced by the 5000 people who descended on the Bandstand for the weekend.  From 11am to 6pm each day we had the delights of folk in all its format, from rock to acoustic to blues (Thomas Ashby, second photo above) bluegrass (Gentleman of the Few) and reggae, courtesy of Jimmy and the Riddles.  There were a plethora of delights for your ears to feast upon, all repeated again on the Sunday with more bands playing, including old favourites Green Diesel.

There were also Morris Dancers (of course, its a folk festival in England, you can't get more traditional folk than Morris Dancers), balloon twisting clowns (one little girl had a balloon version of Ariel from The Little Mermaid, it was quite something), Mr Softee ice-cream and of course craft stands.

Kids dressed in Tinkerbell outfits were twirled in dizzying circles by their parents whilst teenagers hoola-hooped and flung diabolo's high in the air in time to the percussion beats and older couples dangled their feet in the cooling waters of the fountain.

We sat and chatted in the sunshine, occasionally taking it in turns to walk Jax in the shadier areas of the park under the trees where the scent of South American BBQ was drifting through the air from the newly occupied Kiosk.

Eventually I had to pack up and get the dog home as his dribbling was getting a little out of control and he kept eyeing up people's food, but the others carried on their festivities long into the night (I know as I kept getting text messages asking if I was walking back into town to meet them.  The texts got noticeably drunker and more demanding every hour), but by that stage I was tired and my feet hurt, so I was rather lame and just curled up on the sofa with a film.

Here's hoping this is just the first of many years of folk in the gardens.

Hop Festival

The end of August means one thing in East Kent.

Hops.  Not the Tigger variety.  The beer variety.  It's the time of year where it is OK to wear garlands of verdant green hops tied around your head and shoulders to celebrate the harvest.

For the last 25 years the little market town of Faversham has been transformed into a revelry of celebration for the humble hop, and 50,000 people descend upon the high street to drink, eat and dance their way through the first weekend in September.

The Hop Festival is a mish-mash of lots of different things.  It has beer, but it isn't a beer festival.  It has live music, but it isn't a music festival.  It has Morris dancing, but it isn't a folk festival.  It has children's rides, but it isn't a funfair.  It sells food, but it isn't a street market. 

It was born as an idea in the head of the one of the founders of the Rochester Sweeps Festival, and has grown every year since it's initial inception in 1990.  It is now one of the key events in the East Kent calendar, is internationally renowned, and is a real community activity, organised and run by the people who live in and love Faversham.

Now (surprisingly for me) I haven't been before.  I've been meaning to, but life just kept getting in the way.  Not this year though; I was fully determined to partake in all the glory that the hop festival had to offer!

So it was that I found myself skipping down Faversham high street, hops in my hair (and falling in my eyes), beer in my hand (pint of Golden Braid from Hop Daemon at the Old Wine Vaults) and on the hunt for something for lunch with Sarah and Sally. 

It's a little hard to describe the experience of the Hop Festival.  Imagine if you will a high street taken over with street stands selling every conceivable item of food.  There are burgers and hot dogs (ostrich burgers and bison hot dogs mind you), Greek tabbouleh stands, bhaji's by the dozen, ice cream and milkshakes and cream pies and drinks.  Drinks to sink even the stubbornness of battleships - home brew and speciality and artisan beers and ales and ciders alongside flavoured gins and fruit vodka's and floral cocktails.

Everywhere you look people have hops in their hair and a huge amount are also in fancy dress.  We saw smurfs and Arabian sheiks, ballerina's and 80's disco dancers.  There were Pearly Kings and Queens from London parading next to Morris Dancers and Belly Dancers and Folk Dancers. 

There are four huge stages packed with a full programme of live music from around Kent and the surrounding areas, from dawn until dusk, with musical styles ranging from Rock to Folk to Comedy. 

Well spotted, that is Green Diesel playing on the Market Stage in the bottom picture with their very own Hop Festival Song.

Hops have always played an intrinsic part of British life and there is evidence of Hops in Faversham from as early as 900AD.  It's no surprise then that in the last 1100 years we have really grown to know and understand these wonderful little feminine flowers that add such complexity to one of our national drinks.  Faversham has been growing and trading in its own hops since the 1520's and it has become a major part of the Faversham economy ever since.  Shepherd Neame was founded in Faversham in 1698, making it the oldest brewer in Britain and their headquarters (and brewery) are still based in the town to this day.

We drank and sang and danced our way into the early evening, stopping only for some food (Scotch Eggs and quiche's from a local farmers market) and the occasional toilet break.  This normally took a while as most of the pubs close off their seating areas and only allowed access to the bar.  This is the one problem with the Festival - nowhere near enough facilities and nowhere to sit down at all.

We just staggered on through - smaller ones had their own creative solutions.  I must admit, the Hop Bed did look comfortable!

There is a huge amount of entertainment for children, including jugglers and Chinese dragon dancers and a complete Fairground with rides, shooting games, bouncy castles and tombolas.

After admitting defeat on the music front by having the music stages close on us, we headed off with some friends to a local pub for a couple of pints (again, absolutely packed!), and then made our way to one of the schools in the area where they were having, of all things, a ceilidh!

There was a ceilidh band playing and attempting to shout out the instructions to us at the same time.  I wish I could say that everyone looked graceful and elegant whilst completing the ancient, ritualistic dance moves, but sadly this was not the case.

If anything we tripped and stumbled our way, looking around wildly for our next partner, and sprinting to where ever we were supposed to have ended up.

Strictly Come Dancing this was not.

Absolutely bloody brilliant it was.

Can it be the last weekend in August all the time please?

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