No Sense of Fun

It's Monday, so I'm going to moan.  I think that I have good cause to moan.  In fact, I think that I'd be perfectly justified if this were to develop into a full blown rant.  This past weekend I had to endure the annual torture of my aural sensibilities known as Crapchester Shite, sorry, Live.  I've mentioned this so called 'music' event before, where local self-styled musicians take a weekend off from ruining the drinking experiences of pub-goers all over Crapchester and instead hold a free (obviously, as nobody would pay to hear them) 'festival' in the park across the road from me. The cacophony which emanates from it is truly horrendous. Luckily, this year the wind was blowing in the right direction to carry the worst of it away from me.  However, I still had to spend the rest of the weekend with attendees of this event trespassing on my property and generally making a bloody nuisance of themselves.  For some reason, some of them seem to think that they can use my back garden as a short cut to the park (it is neither a short cut nor a public right of way).  They are quite brazen about it - they walk straight past my kitchen window before, in full view of my living room window, climbing over the low wall which separates my garden from the shrubbery of a small piece of council park land.  This still doesn't get them any closer to Crapchester Live than if they had simply walked down the road at the front of my house - they still have another main road to cross.

Part of the problem seems to lie in the fact that there is an alley way giving rear access to this terrace of houses which comes off of another alley way which is a public right of way.  Despite the fact that our alley way is clearly for access only, people still seem to think they have the right to walk down it.  As my house lies at the far end, I've never bothered putting up any kind of gate at the rear of my garden - it is obviously (so I thought) a private garden and not a public thoroughfare.  But it seems that these arseholes disagree.  Clearly, I'm going to have to turn my back garden into a fortress.  This was confirmed as a necessity when, early on Saturday evening, having (ironically) finished doing some work in my garden, I'd just settled down in my living room with a pint of beer, when I saw these two clowns saunter into my garden and proceed to stroll down the path.  This was despite the fact that I was in full view through the living room window.  They didn't move when I stood up and gesticulated at them, nor when I started unbolting the back door,  They finally made a run for it when I opened the door and shouted "Get off my property and stay off" at them.  It only later occurred to me that this phrase came dangerously close to making me sound like some old time crazy coot from a western movie (probably played by Walter Brennan) who chases claim jumpers or cattle rustlers off with his shotgun:  "I see you roun' here ag'in, you'll get an ass fulla buck shot  You're darn tootin'!" dammit!

 Anyway, I didn't have to put up with day two of Crapchester Shite as I was out most of Sunday, but when I got home yesterday evening I found empty beer cans dumped all over the steps at the front of the terrace. I really shouldn't have been surprised - in the past we've had glass bottles smashed all over the same steps by bastards attending the event, not to mention the number of times attendees have mistaken either the steps or the back alley for a public convenience.  For some reason though, the sight of those empty Fosters cans (they don't even have good taste when it comes to beer) really pissed me off.  I ended up kicking them into the gutter - the local council allows this event to be held in their park, so they can clear up the mess the fucking bastards who attend it leave behind.  The worst thing about the whole Crapchester Shite situation is that if you dare to criticise it in any way, you find yourself shouted down by its supporters (who are actually relatively small in number, but generate a lot of noise) and accused of being a 'kill joy', a 'miserable bastard' and of 'having no sense of fun'.  On the latter point, the could be right, as I tend not to have much of a sense of fun when it comes to complete strangers vandalising my property or invading my garden and consequently my privacy.  But I guess I'm just being unreasonable.  Ultimately, their defence of the event and the noise pollution, vandalism and disruption it causes is to fall back on the moronic chant of: "But it's only once a year".  To which, of course, I give my standard counter: if I was to break into your house and relentlessly bum rape you for an entire weekend on an annual basis, would that be OK?  Because, after all, it would only be "once a year".   This time I might even add: "You're darn tootin'!"