25 July 2010 (Sunday) - The Create Festival

I was hoping for a lie-in today, but next door’s children were screaming from 6am onwards. I *think* it was screams of joy and excitement, but screams nevertheless. Between their dogs and children, and the piano on the other side, it can get a tad noisy in my world from time to time. But it’s not necessarily a bad thing; I feel no guilt about whenever I might be a bit noisy myself.

This morning I received several hundred emails, all but one of which went into the spam filter never to be seen again. Surely some law-maker somewhere should be looking at the inordinate amount of spam that is sent through email, and punishing the spammers? The only email to safely negotiate its way to my inbox was one inviting me to my own wife’s birthday party to be held in my own back garden. That was nice.

I then reviewed the invites that I have sent out for said party. Having sent out over fifty invites, I don’t think I’ve had more than a dozen replies, and most of those are from people who can’t make it. So I spent a few minutes sending reminders. Or that is, I thought it would take me a few minutes. Email is a good way to communicate, but people change their email addresses so fast that I can’t keep up. Facebook messaging works, provided Facebook itself works. This morning it wasn’t. I had no end of messages about the server not responding. After an hour’s wrestling with the thing I think I finally managed to message everyone, including a few people who aren’t on Facebook. If any of my loyal readers haven’t received an invite, please accept my apologies, and know that you’re very welcome anyway.

We then went to the “Create Festival” – an afternoon of music in the local park. I say “music” because that was how the council billed it. Perhaps if they had the bands on one after the other it might have been musical. Having them all on simultaneously just made for a noise. Within five minutes I had a headache. Perhaps that put me off the event, but in retrospect it was a rubbish event. It was a shame that the beer tent had no ale, and it was rather sad that the girl operating the ice cream stall didn’t actually know how to operate the ice cream machine. I found it insulting to be searched on the way in to the park. No glass bottles were being allowed. Drunken young thugs were carrying in crates of lager, but a bottle of ale would have been totally forbidden.

For some reason my thoughts kept returning to this weekend’s beer festival in Canterbury where there were live bands. A music festival where thousands of people were walking around with glasses in their hands. And as well as the bands there were things to do, various stalls selling things, and there was no security whatsoever, and (most importantly) no cost to the local ratepayer. I’ve emailed the council with one or two suggestions – I bet they don’t reply. Mind you, they are conducting a survey to find out what locals think about local council services. A shame they’ve not advertised the fact very well.

We came home and I got the lawn mowed, and some of the rubbish shifted from the back yard into black sacks for the dustmen to take away in the week. Interestingly, on seeing me pootling around the garden, the neighbours told their barking dogs to be quiet. As I type this blog entry the neighbours are still in their garden but they can’t see me, and the dogs are screaming. If they tried to get their dogs to shut up all the time, rather than when they think I am around, then the animals might get the idea to be quiet.

And then after a bit of dinner I wandered into NeverWinter for a couple of hours to see what was going on in there. Or that was my intention. I dozed for most of the evening. I dislike spending so many of my so-called “waking hours” asleep. Perhaps if my neighbours were to shut the !#?! up occasionally….