Surprising things!

It was with some surprise that I read a headline about Jeremy Corbyn being invited to speak at Glastonbury. It is a pop festival after all. I imagined the Labour Party leader on the pyramid stage and the massed festival-goers waving their mobile phone torches in the air as they listened - cigarette lighter flames are so last century! 

And then I looked at the article properly and found it began like this: 

"Following the Glastonbury festival’s tradition of fusing pop music and politics, Jeremy Corbyn and shadow chancellor John McDonnell have been asked to speak at the festival’s 2016 event." 

Well, that's put me right. So there is a tradition, is there? Who knew? Probably everyone except me. But then I have never been. Our son has. Years ago he borrowed our largest tent so that he and his friends could camp there. (This was before everyone had those round tents with pop-up frames, the ones like those tunnels you get for small children to crawl through, but it was a fairly modern, lightweight affair.) We never saw the tent again. Maybe it was too mud-sodden to return to us. 

Anyway, Glastonbury has this tradition and Jeremy Corbyn will be the first UK party leader ever invited to speak, although some say it is because of his links to CND. 

Last year it was the Dalai Lama. 

I have mixed feelings about Glastonbury. I like the idea of a music festival. I love concerts in the open air. And yet, this takes place in England in June and the climate is not great, which means there will almost certainly be loads of mud. No, not my thing at all. 

Mind you, what I really find hard to understand is people booking their tickets, which are not cheap, before they even know who is going to be playing. Imagine paying your money and camping out in the mud only to find that you don't really feel enthusiastic about any of the performers. Talk about buying a pig in a poke! 

I reckon I'll just stick to my normal routine. Which has been somewhat disrupted by a series of "events": being conscripted to help my daughter clean and paint the property she rents out; waiting around for the washing machine repair man - who marvelled at how old our machine is and still operational, if in need of a couple of parts; the arrival of an old friend from university, parking his wife on us so that she did not have to sit in the car while he went to watch a local football match. 

Imagine coming all the way from France to watch Lancaster play Mossley, one of our local teams! Okay, they came home from France to visit family as well. I confess to being given to exaggeration. 

This afternoon we are going into Manchester to watch a Japanese film with our eldest granddaughter. I have checked travel arrangements on the GMPTE journey planner so that we can co-ordinate our arrival at Manchester Victoria from different points at this end of the Greater Conurbation. The internet is a wonderful thing! 

But the most amazing thing is that our eldest granddaughter has morphed into a grown-up young person who arranges to meet us for an early evening cinema session. It's bad enough that one's children suddenly become adults without the grandchildren doing the same thing!