It's the bank holiday weekend and there's a wealth of events near me. This year I attended my first Petersfield Summer Festival.
This free event happens on the same weekend as Southampton Pride and Southsea's Victorious Festival. The latter I have attended for 5 of the last 8 years I think. This year, for the second time I only wanted to see two of the line up at Southsea, so I opted to try another event. Having already committed myself to 2 upcoming Prides I decided I would be making the short trip to Petersfield and try this local free event.
I arrived early as a wanted to visit the lake first to take a couple of photos and walk around the beautiful rural space.
Having taken a few (actually not many) photos I moved around to the town centre. This is were I hit a bit of a snag. Having arrived at around 4pm, already having had an hour walking the lake, I found out the event didn't start until 7pm!
I checked the Facebook event, were it did in fact say 7pm. I think I may have got confused with all the different events as to which time was for which.
Anyway, I decided to make my way around the the Red Lion. As I entered I realised this was a Spoons, so yay I could use my order at the table app. I flipping love this app. I don't have to go up to the bar, wait ages to get served, potentially lose my table (because I'm on my own and without a coat), its lovely. I found a good table next to the window and sat down to order.
While there I had a good think about next years Mental Health Blog Awards, caught up with Jodie and read Doris' latest blog post.
I took a break when my food arrived and sat back to enjoy the moment with a couple of drinks. Petersfield really is a lovely town. As I overhear parts of conversations I though back to a date I had maybe 18 months ago at the same place. It was a passionate date, haha.
Anyway... the festival. It was about to start. Well in 30 minutes. So I walked around to the square. The bands were carrying out their final sound checks and the food stalls were almost set up ready for the 7pm start.
There were two bands for the opening night of this 3 day festival (so you can still go along today and tomorrow and enjoy everything Petersfield), Splinter and H!ts. I really enjoyed both bands, each with their own style. I particularly enjoyed Splinter's Drummer and H!ts' Keys player, both displayed a fair amount of charisma.
I had Thai noodles with the spicy sauce. You may have seen my tweets at the time, hahaha. After I said I would try the sauce, the reply at the end of my order was "thank you, good luck", hahaha. The noodles and sauce were ace, but yer I did need a bit of a drink after.
H!ts rounded off the night with a Will Smith medley. I just can't, I was chuckling to myself most of the way through. That was awesome!
There's more stalls and exhibitions happening today and Monday as they are day events with the whole town centre closed to traffic. So I encourage you to go along. I am definitely going to give serious thought to attending this event in future, over much more expensive local events. I loved the atmosphere and the music, it was ace.
On a final note, Petersfield Summer Festival is part of the Hometown Festival line up, which also includes a Spring and Christmas Festivals. Find out more at hometown-festivals.com
