Noel, Noel on Friday at Isle of Wight Festival 2019

John Giddings must have had an exceedingly sore neck by the time we got to Friday at the Isle of Wight Festival 2019.

Throughout Thursday and Friday, the Isle of Wight's weather was teasingly indecisive. The festival's organiser has said in the past that he spends the preceding week constantly looking up for signs of rain which might pour on the festival.

I remained confident that the rain would stay away, based on a couple of the more favourable forecasts and a blind belief that the sun always shines on the Isle of Wight.

Sure, we had a couple of short showers in the campers' field on Thursday night and Friday morning (the only showers most people will have over the weekend) but by the time the main arena opened at 2pm, the weather was spot on. 

For the first time, we were attempting to take the whole family, including the darling daughters who are two and six. We are not the kind of parents who climb Kilimanjaro with young children, so this was a big deal for us. 

It started start badly, with the youngest falling over her feet in the queue and then taking great offence at having to wear a wrist band. Thankfully, she was calmed down by a tasteless rice cake and we were free to explore the site. 

I've said this before, but the Isle of Wight Festival has grown massively since the early noughties. I seem to recall (perhaps not completely accurately) that in the early 2000s, there were only half a dozen food outlets. The queues crawled all the way back to Nettlestone and they all offered a limited choice of chips or fries. 

Nowadays, the site offers trendy food I've never heard of and several rides that you shouldn't really go on after eating a spicy meal. There are many more stages than there used to be, and then there's the Kidz Zone where we spent most of Friday afternoon. 

Child one and two both joined in with the parachute games in the Kidz Zone without embarrassing us and then we spent a fair amount of time wandering the site whilst child one asked a series of questions I didn't know the answer to ("why is that man wearing an orange suit?" "why has that man got glitter in his beard?")

Granny Guru lives quite near the site, so after a couple of hours we decided to return home, put the children to bed and then come back in the evening without them.

And so we returned, just Mrs Guru and I, free to sip prosecco and enjoy the festival. 

It had been many years since Mrs Guru had been to the festival, so I began by taking her up the big wheel (ooerr...) whilst Lily Allen was onstage. The big wheel is an essential part of the festival experience for me, as it gives a chance ​to see the scale of the whole thing, and it's not massively expensive at £5, considering the location.

After failing to meet up with some friends and doing a little more wandering, we settled down for the Courteeners followed by Noel Gallacher's High Flying Birds.

The sun slowly set over the River Medina, I ate some curly fries with barbecue sauce and Noel Gallacher sang Wonderwall. 

What more could you want in your backyard, eh?