Meadows Festival Edinburgh 2016. The Meadows Festival is an annual free community festival with stalls for buying things, lots of food, music bands (two stages this year) and two childrens area. The festival has been ran since 1974 and while this was only my second time visiting I was really impressed this year.

My wife (Liv), daughter (Amelia) and I visited this Sunday arriving around 12.30pm. It was semi busy but we managed to get parked on the main road in front of the meadows. We had a walk around some of the stands where we bought a load of vintage cutlery (perfect for our food photography) and we saw all kinds of things on sale from pots to clothes to old records to comics to musical instruments, furniture and almost anything else you can think of. We met out friends Lucie, Marek and their daughter (their daughter used to go to Amelia’s nursery) and we spent a really good amount of time around the children’s area.

Something I thought was really excellent was there were effectively two play areas. One was a small fairground with bumper cars, carousels, bouncy castles as well as fair ground rides that throw you 100 metres up in the air at speed upside down (no thanks!). Next to this was a play area for younger children and these included a sand tent and plenty of other activities.

Bizarre thing on the day was a bridal show in front of the tents, there was what look like a flash mob pilates thing going on (something I’ve started doing recently (the pilates, not the flash mob)). We had some food which included a tray of chips, cheese and ketchup (£2.50) for Millie, a foot long hot dog each for myself and Liv (£5 each) and we also had a pork burrito (£6) which was really delicious). 2016 is the year that we’re finally trying to save money and stop buying too much crap so while we were tempted to buy all kinds of things we only bought the cutlery which was about 20 pieces of things for £3.50 (bargain!).

We also had really awesome weather today. It was well over 20C in the sun and while I’m already pretty tanned I still managed to get a wee bit of sun burn (Liv looks like a lobster today!). We left around 5pm but from (must have been) 3pm the meadows was absolutely packed out with people. It literally looked like a proper music festival.

Incidentally with the weather, Liv is teaching two Chinese cooking classes at a top independent school in Edinburgh this Wednesday so we drove over to See Woo Chinese Supermarket in Glasgow today. We left Edinburgh and it was 20C but when we got to about 15 miles from Glasgow the thermometer in my car hit 26C. I was worried my car was overheating (it’s a 300bhp really fast Golf R that runs hot anyway) but as soon as we got to Glasgow I opened the window and I couldn’t believe it. 26C!!! It’s funny but even though Edinburgh and Glasgow are just 45 miles apart they have completely seperate climates. One can be pouring and the other blazing sunshine. But anyway, hopefully that 26C will come to Edinburgh for a few days.