Spring is Sprung …

So – the temperatures are finally on the up (it touched 16 degrees on Saturday!), the garden centres have their best garden furniture on display, the cricket season has started and caravans everywhere are on the move. It has, by all accounts, been a long winter – or at least, a winter in the classic mould. In any case, I’m glad the bloody thing’s over, and I spent two months of it in Australia – pity the poor bastards who had to sit through its duration.

Our little town of Nailsworth has its annual festival on at the moment. It kicked off with festival Saturday in which lots of third-rate buskers, failed and/or student thespians and social workers in outreach programs descend on the town centre and put on all sorts of totally shite events, all announced by our very own town crier. This town’s already attacted more than its fair share of lentil eating middle-class ageing-hippy twats, but boy-oh-boy do they come out in force when the festival’s on. You couldn’t move for Volvo-driving tools in stupid hats accompanying their fully boho’d wives and snot-faced kids. I heard one very down-trodden looking boho mum shrieking ‘Casper, casper, stop this instant,’ as her sprog zoomed down the hill towards town on his trendy wooden sit-on ‘bike’. Perhaps he’d have stopped a bit sooner if you’d bought him a real bike, with things like brakes, instead of that crappy penny-farthing the poor bugger has to use.

So, Liz insisted we go and check it out, because the fire station were throwing open their doors to the public and our son Jack, like most four year old boys, loves fire engines. As expected, Jack thoroughly enjoyed himself clambering all over the fire engines, and he even got to spray a hose at some static targets and accidentally sprayed a bewildered group of Dutch tourists on a bicycle tour of the Cotswolds. Which made my day.

Liz then suggested we go to the town centre because there was a juggler there last year who Jack ‘absolutely loved’. When we arrived the Stroud Samba band were busy deafening the audience and working the local mongs into a frenzy with their crazy latin beats (in fact I think I’d say the dancing mongs were the highlight of the day for me). So the Samba band wander off and on comes the juggler. Only he’s done his back in, so there’s no unicycle, just some lofted fruit. It was all very crap, but nearly descended into chaos because the hat-wearing ageing-hippy parents of Casper and Lavinia and Jasper don’t agree with things like telling-your-kid-to-sit-the-fuck-down-while-the-nice-man-does-his-clever-show so they ran backwards and fowards in front of him, screwing it up for the other kids, like our Jack, sitting neatly and cross-legged on the floor. Many of these simpletons send their brood to a place called the Acorn School where “We try to create what might be called a chalice – a simple image of our inner work as teachers – into and out of which can flow the substance of our high ideals” and that’ll be £1600 per term thanks guvnor.

So, after the delights of the town centre, we wandered over to the playing fields to check out some of the early day bands performing at Nailstock and no I didn’t make that up. It all seemed a hell of a lot more impressive than last year’s shite effort, with professional stage, sound system, marshals and plenty of food and drink stalls. Only caught one band, who were, well – of a standard you’d expect at something called Nailstock – had a hotdog (£3 to you chief) and a beer (£2 to you chief), Jack went on a bouncy slide (£1 for 3 goes to you chief) and then we went home, to enjoy the rest of Nailstock in full echoy glory from our house on the opposite side of the valley.

Actually – I’ve just remembered. The high-point wasn’t the mongs-in-a-frenzy, but the community police patrol officers, who wandered the streets of Nailsworth whilst the concert was on, sticking tickets on all the Volvos, Rav 4′s, Forresters, X5s and A4s parked on yellows and verges. Oh how I laughed.