In what’s now an annual event, it was the Wakefield Festival of Food, Drink and Rhubarb this weekend. Wakefield is of course slap bang on the middle of the Rhubarb Triangle, being the area of West Yorkshire where it’s impossible to get the ruddy stuff out of your garden.

I’d already promised Ellie I would take her since Ben had a party to go to, and I hot-foot it back up the motorway in time for a lunchtime wander. Wakefield’s precinct was full of marquees and tents selling ‘Yorkshire Fare’, nothing much different from the monthly Farmer’s Market but we did enjoy a wander picking up a jar of lime curd for me and some cheese for Ellie. At that point Ellie decided she wanted to wander up to the Cathedral, and read gravestones.

Parenthesis here: Ellie’s doing lots of reading. It’s hard to stop her reading, she got a school trophy for ‘Literacy’ on Friday, and today her particular penchant was street signs, a map she’d picked up from the Ridings Shopping Centre, and gravestones outside the Cathedral. As a result of the latter we found – quite unexpectedly – the grave of one of Luis Fernandes’ daughters. Fernandes was one of Wakefield’s brewers whose story is told in Aspects of Wakefield 3 and is whom the current Fernandes Brewery is named after.

Back around the marquees to the ‘Local Government’ one where we managed to pick up info about the sort of school dinners Ellie has – great, since she never tells us and we have no idea whether she’s into turkey twizzlers or carrot sticks. The local fire service are running a drive to replace smoke alarms with their ‘recommended’ model free-of-charge so I signed us up for that, and discussed bicycle routes with a local group who were kind enough to provide maps of where the children could ride their bikes when the weather gets warmer.

Sadly we weren’t in time for any of the presentations and the queue for “example” food was waaaay too long, but it looked like fun. Ellie would like to try some Thai food which considering we have problems getting her near anything spicy is an absolute bloody miracle.

Finally after picking up the groceries from the market we saw some street entertainers and wandered back to the car.