A grand day out

I'm a fan of pop festivals and folk festivals and the like. I suspect this is because I'm sadly trying to regain some vestige of those few glorious summers in the early eighties when I was in fact king of the world and nothing was going to stand in my way. Sad, Isn't it.

Festivals now have better toilets, better food and to be honest better music than we had back then.

But one thing that gets right on my wick is the way parents treat their children and their world around them.

Its not the children's fault, per se, but the parents.

At one recent folk festival a child penetrated my somewhat befuddled consciousness in the tent opposite. She had clearly spent the whole of the last year learning to play "she moved through the fair" on the recorder.
Now to be fair, it was quite a passable performance, but hearing it constantly did start to grate a bit. As it was the only tune she knew, she was obviously determined to let us all know how good she was at it, for two days.

The other incident was the 13-year-old brat who decided to have a screaming row with her parent right at the beginning of a performance by Richard Thompson of his classic anthem, 1952 Vincent Black Lightning. Fortunately for her she moved off at the end of the first stanza just as I was about to take her gently by the throat and explain that I'd been waiting for this moment for longer than she had been on the planet, and could she kindly shut the hell up.

It is a matter of some astonishment to me that parents would ever take their children to a festival of any kind at all, twice.

Little Jake and Saskia are not going to enjoy it, no matter what. No matter how many jugglers and story telling workshops, they're never going to enjoy it, because children only want to spend time with their parents away from home, TV and toys if they are going to be the centre of attention, and that's not going to happen if they are competing with Seth Lakeman or the Kooks. Its just not.

At one point I saw a parent at the festival lean down and scream into the face of his bawling five year old, who was clearly having some kind of crisis because the bubble blower he had been bought was the wrong colour and he'd actually wanted a blue one, and dad yelled that he was "never going to take him anywhere nice again if he was going to behave like this"
And the child stopped screaming and a wave of understanding came over his face and then he bawled louder and harder, till the snot came out his nose and he went bright red because he realised that if he did, his dad had said he'd take him home and away from these funny smelling people and these awful toilets with their funny blue water in, and he could curl up and go to sleep in the quiet with his teddies and his Nintendo, which is what he really wanted to do.

And if you look at a parent? with anything close to disapproval while their little charge is trying to emasculate you with a diablo the response is that you are clearly some kind of evil child hater who doesn't deserve to be breathing the same air as them.

Please don't take children to festivals once they've got past three. They hate the mud, the music, the food, the fact that mummy has lost her temper with dad because he's looked once too often at the pretty 20 year old in the crop top with the braids, living in a tent, the lack of fizzy pop, in fact everything about it.

And don't try to take them again until they say they really want to go.
You'll miss all the bands you want to see, and spend all your time making wicker fish and fairy wings.

Leave it. Its not worth it.



(with the grandparents)