Month: September 2026

When my little girl first moved to York we dropped her off there and Emma and I booked into a swanky Michelin star restaurant and had a nice dinner for two. It was during a poo break on this trip and taking a look at what was going on nearby I came across a Google Maps marker for Dick Turpin’s grave! Dick Turpin’s grave!

This started a whole side quest of stuff where I realised that the kids of today have no idea who Dick Turpin is, asked people in Booths and everything. Startling. Anyway, I told Amelia she should go, then every time she came home I would ask “have you been to Dick Turpin’s grave?”. Always the reply was no.

Anyway, Emma and I were in York with a bit of time to kill recently so we went to see Dick Turpin’s grave. Quite the sight and story it was too.

Emma and I decided to attend Ludlow Food Festival and rekindle our love of cooking.

We loved it. We went to talks by Chefs and YouTube superstars. We bought food, wine, books, fudge. We spent a lot of our time in the Cooking With Fire section as that area seemed more in line with Emma and I as people. We watched the chap from School Of Wok prepare some truly amazing food. We stalked Jad by watching him cook, buying his book and getting him to sign it, then going back later and getting a picture of him with Emma, then going to watch him do another demo, and then completely accidentally by hanging around next to him as he was hanging out with the Kadai dude. Really did feel kinda stalkerish. Imagine what he’ll think when we turn up in his restaurant in Reigate on the way to visit Aggy.

We bought sauces and pans, hot sauce, cakes and cruffins. Amazing, amazing two days.

We loved the hand made iron pans which were made just down the road. Coming back all inspired I fired up the iron pan and created a Tofu with Gochujang dinner. The trip definitely inspired me back to cooking.

Every few years we have a festival in our back garden. We call it SteeleFest. The last one was in 2019 I think. The reason we have them so infrequently is because they’re a proper pain in the arse. We have to pay for caterers and booze, we have to erect a marquee and a stage, we have to get the garden fit for having guests around. It takes weeks out of our lives.

2026 was no exception.

For about a month leading up the the Glastonbury of the North festival pretty much every conversation in the house revolved around planning for the party. We rented straw bales because last time it took us months to get rid of the ones that we’d bought. We borrowed a marquee from our neighbours because having a company come and put one up for us was going to cost thousands. We hired a guy to come in and make pizzas because we’d somehow managed to invite over a hundred people and no way was I feeding everyone from my BBQ

As we got closer to the day the weather was looking more and more promising so we opted for an outdoor stage rather than a couple of palettes with some OSB board over the top. Dan suggested we should build a Glasto-esque pyramid stage out of his scaffolding. So we did.

Unfortunately Dan was down South with Freddie and Sarah on a sailing trip when Oli and I decided we’d build the stage out of scaffolding. So all the scaffolding was at Dan’s house, and the party was at our house. It isn’t very far but that scaffolding is bloody heavy. Oli volunteered to carry it bit by bit between the houses but that would have been horrific. We decided to do a test build at Dan’s house so we knew what we needed then we loaded it into Dan’s horsebox and got Aaron to tow it around with his van. It’s nice to have friends.

The picture above is the stage fully erected the day before the party.

Fortunately Jason and Nicole arrived from Phoenix the day before the party. It was fortunate for two reasons:

1. It gave us a chance to go out for dinner and drink some beer rather than spending every second of waking moments getting ready for the party.
2. They helped set some stuff up 🙂

The day finally arrived. We had the lightest of drizzly showers at about 11am but then the sun came out. The band turned up and got stuck straight into the beer supply. The guests arrived, the straw bales were arranged and everyone had a lovely time.

As the sun was going down Amelia’s boyfriend Jace got his decks out and did an awesome DJ set for us

The party went on very late into the night/morning. Some of it moved into the front garden. Some of it moved to the roof of the house and some of it just carried on in the marquee.

At about 3am I went to bed. I managed to take my shoes off at the door and my hat off before I got in bed. That was it. I slept in my cowboy jeans, shirt and leather tassly waistcoat.

The next day the clean up began. It was truly horrific. We filled every bin we could find. I got so sick of trying to recycle 105 pizza boxes that I just set fire to them in the steel drum. Fortunately a lot of people camped over so they helped in the clear up and I thanked them by cooking about 60 sausages on the BBQ for breakfast.

11 days after the party I’m writing this post. The garden is more or less back to normal. We finally returned the stage and marquee to Dan and Sarah yesterday. Tomorrow our bins will be emptied so we can return to putting stuff into the bin rather than stacking bin bags in my garage and we still have enough booze left over to host another SteeleFest. It was an amazing party, much fun was had but it was a full on three weeks of work to get ready for it and tidy up after it, not to mention all the time that went into planning it, not to mention we could have had a family holiday for what the whole thing cost. That my dear reader is why we only do these things every five years or whatever.