All aboard! Report from the Port Eliot Festival

It's Maddie's idea to do a festival, and so we find ourselves in Wildings Wood at Port Eliot, singing and enacting an exploration of the traditional ‘Hole in the Bottom of the Sea’, meeting the shark, eel, squid, crab and weeds who live there.

Maddie happens to be my favourite daughter, recently of Sussex University where she researched spontaneous musicality in Early Years free-play and ‘distincted’ herself a master's in education. She's accompanied me in lots of primary school music visits and workshops and sometimes we turn out as what might be loosely described as a band.

This year MERYC, the charity that promotes good practice in early childhood music education, sponsored Maddie's visit to their conference in Ghent and she's been all fired-up from inspiring exchanges with those people, most recently founder-member Emma Hutchinson, director of Music House for Children.