Yesterday I attended London’s first ever Catfest and was looking forward to it. I had a lovely day and it was wonderful to be in a place filled with like minded people. There has been quite a lot of negative comments on social media some justified and in my opinion some not. So here’s my take on the whole event. When I arrived, there was a very long queue to get in and people were hot, well you can’t really blame the weather on the event organisers. The queue was very slow and they needed a fast track queue for people with advance tickets or just more staff to get people inside. I think this was just teething problems as the event has never happened before and maybe the event organisers were inexperienced? Anyway enter we did and oh my it was packed and it was hot! This is often the case when you go to a show and eventually people move around but it was quite hard to see all the stalls. There were speakers that I was looking forward to listening to but they were on the stage and there was nowhere to sit and listen to them properly, they really needed to be in another room with seats. I would have been annoyed if I was one of the speakers. It was also quite annoying when you were trying to chat to the stall holders and couldn’t hear very well due to the speakers. I found the stall holders very friendly and happy to chat and most of their products were interesting but unfortunately there wasn’t enough stalls to spend all day looking at or spending your money on. I would have loved to have seen more stalls with cat stuff to buy. Unfortunately there were some real cats there that were not happy and looked stressed and hot, I found this totally unnecessary and upsetting.
The event needed to be much bigger and I hope if Catfest is done again a bigger venue is found. The venue was also in another building over the road and unfortunately you had to queue again to get inside as it wasn’t big enough and entrance was done on a one person out one person in system……
Eventually when allowed in we got to meet the people from The Big Cat Sanctuary who were very interesting to chat to and one of my favourite cat authors Anita Kelsey with her book “Claws”. Another lovely surprise was James Bowen and Bob the Street Cat were signing books there. Now Bob was just sat there and taking it all in his stride, he is one cool cat! Nothing seems to stress Bob, I suppose he’s used to it all…….
There were also kittens and cats there up for adoption, I was worried that they would be stressed but I didn’t see any such thing. My high light of the day was getting to meet lots of crazy cat people and saying hello to a few of my favourite cat authors especially Gwen Cooper, New York Times bestselling author of “Homer’s Odyssey”.
I also have to mention the yummy vegan food for sale, it was good value and healthy.
So all in all it was a good day but improvements needed for another year and no real cats allowed? Just Bob?
Love Rachel xx