It’s been a big old day so forgive me if I start falling asleep midway through this post. We started with brunch at My Favourite Cafe in Essex Road, which has indeed become something of a favourite of ours. We were with some church people for a meeting but a meeting with bacon is better than most of the meetings I have to go, so it’s all good. Then we jumped on a 38 to Islington Green, bumped into another church-related friend and swung by Pret for free coffee and crisps and cheap mango. Everything you need for an afternoon out.
We were early in to Festival of the Girl and headed straight to the Blue Zone to book onto the RADA workshop Eva wanted. There was already a queue and I was told just before I got to the front that the RADA workshop was booked up. So I added Eva as first on the waiting list and -spoiler – she managed to get it. Phew! We were off to a good start.
There was an author talk going on as I queued – I think it was M.G. Leonard – and that was interesting to listen to. Eva wanted to make something out of clay at the Girls Rising stall so I stood behind her and learnt about beetles. They’re cuddly, apparently.
There is so much to do at the festival and it’s impossible to fit everything in, especially as Eva likes to take her time over tasks. After the clay, the next stop was game designing and she came up with a concept around an evil puppet called Margo. Margo is genuinely quite terrifying:
It was time for the RADA workshop, which we did get into – phew! – and the girls were learning a song from Moana called “How Far I’ll Go”, Now, anyone who knows me in one of my other guises will know that I’m more than familiar with this song and even taught it to Eva’s Year 6 class over the summer. So even though parents were encouraged to sing along, I didn’t exactly have to work hard in this workshop. I could pretty much sing that song in my sleep, tricky alto notes and all. The RADA guy leading it was very encouraging to the kids and straight after the workshop, they went out onto the main stage and sang it for the rest of the festival. It was lovely to see Eva really engaging and emoting as she sang. It’s a good song, even if I’ve spent a touch too much time with it this year.
After that, she did start to flag. Festival of the Girl is great but it’s a lot of sensory processing and a lot of the activities require some thinking, which Eva finds exhausting. Having the workshops in separate spaces this year worked so much better than having them on the mezzanine last year and it did create a calmer zone, which was great. But by 4PM, we were ready for fries and refillable drinks. You can guess where.
There is so much more we could have done but we had a nice afternoon and part of having a nice afternoon is knowing when to call it quits. She has the activity book and goody bag to look through so that festival feeling doesn’t have to end here. I just hope neither of us end up dreaming about Margo…!
