It was half-past three on a muggy Sunday afternoon and I was flailing between suffocation, sickness and epiphany under a small marquee in a West Country field. In the baby-changing tent at the family-friendly Camp Bestival, the atmosphere was not just sticky and stifling, but also filled with a poisonous, sweet miasma; a sepia-toned fug that needled at every pore of my body.
It was there that I had the revelation, as clear as the curls of gas escaping from the bins of blown nappies; if I was 10 years younger, the thought ran, this would be so much easier – and easy is better than complicated. Indeed, one of the many unbidden pieces of advice I received before becoming a parent – on the subject of keeping kids entertained – was simply to "keep it simple". Contrary to this brilliant nugget of truth, the festival seemed inordinately complicated; a logistical nightmare that became perfectly mirrored in my reaction to it.
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