{"id":2979,"date":"2026-09-02T09:56:54","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T09:56:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/junglefreedomfighters.com\/?p=2979"},"modified":"2026-09-02T09:56:56","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T09:56:56","slug":"steelefest-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/junglefreedomfighters.com\/?p=2979","title":{"rendered":"SteeleFest 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2026 was no exception.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The beginning of the construction of the marquee…8 days before the party<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The picture above is the stage fully erected the day before the party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fortunately Jason and Nicole arrived from Phoenix the day before the party. It was fortunate for two reasons:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  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.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. They helped set some stuff up \ud83d\ude42<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
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    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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    oh, yeah, it was a cowboy themed party, this isn’t my usual attire<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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    <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    Told you we hired a pizza man. Quite expensive buying pizza for 105 people.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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    Me, with Sarah and Dan, the kind suppliers of marquee and stage. Couldn’t have done it without them<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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    Dragan, Josh and Amber made it up from London which was lovely.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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    <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    As the sun was going down Amelia’s boyfriend Jace got his decks out and did an awesome DJ set for us<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    This picture was taken 3 days after the event.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    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 … <\/p>\n

    Continue reading “SteeleFest 2026”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/junglefreedomfighters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/junglefreedomfighters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/junglefreedomfighters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/junglefreedomfighters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/junglefreedomfighters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2979"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/junglefreedomfighters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2979\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2995,"href":"https:\/\/junglefreedomfighters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2979\/revisions\/2995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/junglefreedomfighters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/junglefreedomfighters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/junglefreedomfighters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}