Jonesfest 2021

I'm just recovering from the maddest weekend. If you didn't know me well maybe you'd think I'd had a big night out drinking - that's what normal people do in a mad weekend right? But I am far from normal. I'm recovering from having about 8 families doing a ceilidh in my very average sized garden, followed by my house being pretend burgled by 4 comedians for a game.

Jonesfest is a festival I hold in my garden for no reason. People keep asking me "what this in aid of?" and "are you raising money for something?" and "is it someone's birthday?" No. I just love people. I've missed people, and I don't have the right personality for a January birthday. It came about last year after we finally got our garden fixed. We got this decking area for eating outside, but when you take off the table and chairs it looks just like a stage. And when you own sound equipment and have lots of creative friends it's just rude not to put on a festival.

The first one was last August. At the time it felt like we were celebrating the end of covid but we now know it was just that little sweet spot between 2 lockdowns. It was more restricted last year, it was the rule of 6 indoors and 30 outdoors. I cancelled a lot of the things I had planned. We had a circus skills workshop and a drama workshop for families, a bike ride, a baking for kids session and a breeze block sculpting workshop. It was a lot of fun and not too much work.

This year I decided to go bigger. I'd planned two evening performances, a music night and a comedy night, as well as a load of other workshops and stuff. It was a lot to organise, probably a little too much and about two weeks before I was pretty stressed and had no time. I could have put less effort in, but once I have the idea in my head for something I find it hard to back down. I don't think anyone would have complained if they didn't receive complementary Jonesfest tote bags, but that didn't stop me getting up at 6am, before the kids, twice so that I could print more Jonesfest tote bags. I also took a whole day off work to sew together plain cotton bunting so that every kid could paint a bit to decorate the garden and then at the end they could take their bit home.

The Friday was the bunting workshop and the all age music festival (with face painting and hair braiding). Dan was going to play some of his album (Exhume check it out on Spotify) and then I had 2 other very talented friends that I had somehow managed to persuade to play. I woke up to heavy rain and Percy running in saying "happy jonesfest!" he was so excited! It was a difficult decision to cancel the first nights activities, but I think it was the right one. We did have gazebos and stuff but I don't think many people would have come and and I don't think it would have been that fun to be out in the rain. Percy was so gutted though and was in tears. I was pretty sad too, but we continued with the bunting making which the kids loved and then saturday was a big day of fun.

The day began with a crochet workshop led by my mum and a simultaneous chess tournament. I've never done crochet before it's really hard! It's like a magic trick, if you're good you just wiggle a stick next to some wool until it makes a flower, if you're bad you just make a blob.

The next event was the kids show. This was the one thing I knew a lot of people were coming to. Half an hour before it started it was pretty stressful. I had a house full of family we were trying to make lunch for, sound equipment to set up, I was running all over the house trying to find rugs to cover the slightly wet grass, some good friends that we haven't seen for ages arrived early and I just didn't feel I had the capacity to be nice and get things done (sorry friends don't take it personally!) but then it all came together. and by the time more people arrived I was pumped and answered the door like "WELCOME TO JONESFEST!!!" the garden filled up with families and it looked mad like a real festival.

We started the way all good festivals should start with my Dad playing nursery rhymes on the accordion. I'd forgotten I'd agreed to sing them on the mic. Then we had the absolutely awesome Leila doing a teaching some super hero style dance moves, she's so good at what she does. If you have pre-school kids you should take them to her group, it's so much creative fun. Here's her theatre company 

Then we had my good friend Steve and his granny puppet reading a story. He did this a bit on Facebook live in lockdown, and I'd forgotten how genuinely hilarious it was. He was just reading the book A Squash and A Squeeze by Julia Donaldson but the accents and the little asides and the way he interacted with the audience made it incredibly entertaining for all ages.

The finale of this mad show was my dad attempting to teach everyone the eightsome reel, a sort of ceilidh dance. He only recently started learning the accordion and is good considering that, but he was not good enough to play and shout the dance moves so it descended into a beautiful chaos, and then I tried to help by shouting random things like "right hand star!" with no clue if that's what they were meant to be doing.

After the kids show there was meant to be an adults aerial hoop workshop, which turned into a bit of a free for all mess around on the hoop. We watched Jo be amazing and other people struggle to get on. It was loads of fun though and very kind of her to drive her hoop set up all the way from Bradford with a baby.

Baby Zac getting into the festival spirit

The evening was my comedy night, I couldn't wait. I had 4 of my most favourite comedians who I would also call friends to entertain the audience. 

a calming rabbit cuddle is what comedians need before every show.

We did a mash up of the shows Mock the Week and Taskmaster. So for mock the week we did things like "unlikely things to hear in a covid briefing" and everyone stepped up to the mic with their funny suggestions. Then we did some Taskmaster style silly tasks, they had to recreate an artwork on a teammate's face. Then we played a blind game of connect 4 where I scented the pieces. The red counters smelled of peppermint and the yellow ones smelled of next perfume. Blindfolded contestants had to take a piece from a mixed box and place into the connect 4 game. Every third go the non-blindfolded member of the team got to play a piece. While I was setting up for this game I was thinking "maybe this is a rubbish idea for a game, I should have given it more thought," but it was actually incredible. What made it so funny was that Mike (who is Bulgarian) had never heard of the game Connect 4. So it got to his go, he was on the red team, and there were about 5 red counters in and only one yellow one - it was an easy win for the red team if only they knew what was going on. Mike seem to seriously have not worked out from the title "Connect 4" that you have to connect 4 until his frustrated blind team mate shouted out "JUST GET 4 REDS IN A ROW!"

The last game was the maddest and the one that Dan thought was not a good idea. But I think most of the time, as risk increases fun increases. The game was to burgle our house. So the 4 comedians got given a bag (a Jonesfest totebag of course) and they had 5 minutes to go into our house, in the dark (because it was late by this point) and search around for the most valuable items. There were two kids and a baby asleep upstairs: if you wake anyone you loose the game. When you think the 5 minutes is up you have to go out into the garden and climb behind the shed, over a bit of chicken wire to some wood off our property. No one was allowed a watch or phone, they had to just guess when 5 minutes was up. Then they all came back and revealed their loot.

Lee had misunderstood the value thing and squeezed a breeze block sculpture of a head in his bag. Mike had a load of random thing like several pencil cases of felt pens and a wii remote. Anna had taken the kettle, but Sean was the clear winner with our house keys, our car keys, my sisters car keys and the house keys of our neighbours who happened to be in the audience! The night came to an abrupt end when we got heckled over the fence by the neighbours and then it started to rain. It was the most bonkers joy filled thing. Mike wanted to chat to me about using this panel show format again and I'm happy to see if that's possible, but something makes me think it was a "you have to be there" kind of moment and those people and this weird garden festival scenario was the perfect combination for this exact type of weird silliness.

Sunday was a lot more chilled and started with a lino print workshop. It's something I've been learning for a few months and it's really fun and I love to share things I've learnt. 

After lunch we headed out to Childwall woods for a wide game. This particular game, called dragons, is one I grew up playing. The knights have to find a flag and take it back to base, the dragons have to catch all the knights and take them to the secret lair. It's so enjoyable to play and way better exercise than a walk in the woods. I arrived dressed in a full dragon onesie of course, and Percy was in his generic reptile onesie (crocodile or dinosaur maybe?). When we pulled up, there was a big group of people in hi-vis jackets that were "Friends of Childwall woods." They demanded an explanation of why were we dressed like that and then I had to explain the concept of wide games and then Jonesfest. I showed the guy a video of people doing a ceilidh in our garden, as if that was some kind of explanation of why I was dressed as a dragon.

I must have first played this game about age 10 and continued playing it until my early 20s. One of my friends Ben that came with his son says he remembers playing a game of it in a park with me back in the day and getting weird looks for chasing me. It was exciting to be passing on this game to the next generation! To make it work with small kids we didn't let the kids go off independently, so Dan had Eric and I had Percy. We also made a whatsapp group before we started so we could communicate vital info like "it's the end of the game." This was a new dimension that didn't exist when I played before. As well as communicating important stuff we could send threatening messages like "we're watching you little knights" and that's always fun. I quickly discovered that a fleecy onesie and wellies is not the quickest outfit for chasing people. It makes sense if you think about it, you never see Olympians wearing wellies. The whole thing was a lot of fun and I'm really up for doing it again, the more people the better so if you're in Liverpool and up for it let me know.

The finale of Jonesfest was a bring and share tea. I was so exhausted by this point my legs were aching from the aerial hoop and dragons and I just wanted to sleep, but only my sister Sarah and the Curtis family, who are big fans of Jonesfest and have been to nearly everything, came and it was a really lovely chilled out end to a mad 3 days.

There were points where I thought I won't do it again, it's a lot of work and sometimes it can be disappointing when people don't turn up to something you've planned, or the weather lets you down, but by the end I was so happy with the whole thing and I'm already having thoughts about Jonesfest 2022. If you helped out or just came along thank you so much for being part of this very weird but fun idea of mine.