Summer Sundae

This weekend the Jabberwocky will be at Summer Sundae Weekender, serving up our hottest, most delicious toasties and trying to prefect the art of sleeping-while-making-toasties. It will be a massive festival, the largest we have been at so far, and hopefully the weather will be what ever type of weather you need for optimum toastie-purchasing. Although I think that’s possibly slightly overcast, and I would hate to be held responsible.

It’s a long weekend, and to be perfectly honest I’m already tired. I can tell because I keep writing lines of blog and then deleting them. The mind is willing, but the brain has already shut down for the night. This at the beginning of 4 days that will all be at least 12 hours of running around, throwing toasties about and generally being not asleep on the sofa. We have tea, but if slightly shorter festivals are anything to go by tea can only get you so far. Beyond that is an oddly calm place full of an overwhelming desire to lie down, just for a moment.

I’m not expecting Sunday – day 4 – to be especially pretty. I think we can assume that after 4 nights on an air bed after 16 hours a day standing up nothing will be fun, ever again. Most things will be there for the sole purpose of making life harder, and out of those things a fair few will be loud and persistent. A large amount of time will probably be spent thinking up ways to quietly nap and/or kill people nearby.

But I still love doing it. More than practically anything else. There is so much simplicity in street food. The hungry person arrives, gives you money, you give them fresh food you have just cooked. They eat it, everyone wins. There is no waiting to be seated, no frustration that the drinks are late, no draught from the door, no looming fear of a bad online review and no mock politeness in the face of a rude customer because of this.

Pure is probably too strong a word, but it is a great way to serve food, and hopefully a pretty good way to receive it. Even Barny, who behind the confines of a kitchen door will match any chef on thought-provoking and imaginative swearing, prefers to be out front, in the van, actually seeing and talking to the folks who eat the food. He occasionally even dials back the swearing as well.

If we can stay awake long enough then hopefully we can shift a good, solid load of toasties and float the Jabberwocky until next weekend, where we will be repeating the whole glorious, painful ordeal in Oxford; thankfully without the camping.

Tomorrow all systems are go, and we will be attempting some kind of power-rangers-style combining of forces to drag together all the energy we have, forming a giant toastie making superhero who will then do battle in a rather unconvincing polystyrene set, here represented by the very lovely De Montfort Hall and Gardens. Victory will be ours.