Blighting Summer

Apparently this year's Glastonbury Festival starts on Friday.  Which means that it must be Summer.  There have been other clues, (apart from the sunny weather, but that means nothing these days, we have heat waves in Spring and Autumn on a regular basis now - but there's no global warming, Trump tells us), such as increasing amounts of tennis cluttering up the TV schedules.  Indeed, with the Queens tournament in full flow in London, it can only be a couple of weeks at most before the curse of Wimbledon falls upon us.  At least there's no Olympics, World cup or European Championship this year to further disrupt the TV schedules.  I know, I know, I'm sounding like a real old curmudgeon, aren't I?  Resenting the preponderance of sports and festivals during the Summer months because they disrupt my attempts to ignore the good weather and sit inside watching the TV instead. 

Not that I watch any more TV in the Summer than I do at any other time of year - I just resent being deprived of the opportunity of watching TV by these events, which inevitably overrun and make it impossible to watch stuff when it is convenient to me.  There's nothing worse than sitting down in front of the TV in expectation of being able to watch something, only to find that it isn't on because of sport or festivals.  Or worse, that it was scheduled to be on, but has been delayed due to Wimbledon or whatever, overruning.  Meaning that you constantly have to be checking to see whether it has started yet, thereby exposing oneself to the tennis or whatever else it is that you have no interest in watching.

The other reason that I have such a downer on music festivals like Glastonbury is that they just encourage other people to try staging similar, more local, events.  Obviously, these don't boast the saving grace of the bigger festivals of actually featuring acts that you might have heard of and, more importantly, might be musically competent.  Instead, we get abominations like Crapchester Shite, sorry, Crapchester Live, which is due to blight a weekend for me somewhen in the next month or so, featuring local self styled musicians, who are uniformly awful.  That said, it isn't just the fact that, for those of us with the misfortune to live close by the venue have to put up with two solid days of having our ears assaulted by what sounds like people moronically shouting over some atonal cacophony, which annoys me the most. 

No.  It's the fact that the cretins who attend it seem to think that they can use my back garden as some kind of short cut to the venue (it actually isn't, quite apart from the fact that it isn't a public right of way in the first place), and their friends seem to think they can use the alleyway running behind this terrace of houses as a urinal.  Year in, year out I have to put up with this, but every time I try to complain about it, I'm shouted down as some kind of kill joy.  I suppose what I should do is follow some of these bastards home and shit in their gardens whilst playing loud music and throwing empty beer cans all over the place.  See how they like that.