2000s home education nostalgia
I'm doing (a very lax) Blaugust. This is 2/hopefully 31 posts in August.
I was thinking about labyrinths recently and got a wave of nostalgia for the early 2000s. At this time I was being home educated by my mother, and one year (I forget which one exactly) we attended a home educators festival in the south of England.
I think it was called Hesfest at the time, but now appears to live on under the acronym HEFF. It was one of the first festival type things I attended, with art workshops, music and a lot of rope swings and just playing around. I didn't have any particular friends - a lot of the families we knew at the time had younger children, so I remember wandering and observing a lot, which I think is my tendency anyway. I probably mostly spent time with my mum and the other parents, and some older kids. My main memories are how hot a summer it was - driving back out car didn't have air con and we kept the windows open and my legs stuck to the leather seats - and just the vibe of the place. It probably won't surprise you to learn there was a strong hippy element to home educators - a lot of tie dye and long hair and children named after trees. I think back fondly now to the amount of goth teens there were. I would have probably been wearing something like this.
One of my other strong memories is making a labyrinth on the beach, which I remember walking around as it fell dark, with some sort of fire element - we were holding candles, or flaming torches? I'm not even sure if this was at HesFest on another home educators camp! My only evidence of the HesFest connection is I vaguely recall owning a hoodie from the festival with a labyrinth on it, and this holding some significance for the festival. It's also probably where I learnt the difference between a labyrinth and a maze.
I've tried googling variations of "HEFF home education festival UK labyrinth 2000s" and honestly it's kind of fun to have a mystery (even if these may be totally erroneous memories of mine). I'll have to dig deeper and ask my mother some time.
Some of my googling took me to a site called labyrinth locator, which maps labyrinths all across the world - fun! I might try and visit some in my city, and add any I know are missing.