I don’t know why I bother trying to talk to my dad about anything, especially after he’s been out drinking. It always comes back to the same thing each time and I end up annoyed and angry at him.

Tonight, for example, I tried to show him one of my photos from Latitude that I’m particularly proud of, he then brings the conversation round to Tim Minchin and how he shouldn’t be using all his foul language and that he’ll teach him proper English, despite me pointing out he went to private school and consequently has a rather good grasp of the English language already. I dunno, it’d be nice if just for once he’d take an actual interest in the things I like rather than trying to wind me up about them. Maybe then I wouldn’t get the inevitable result of every conversation we have when he’s drunk, which usually goes something like this:

Dad: You should have done a maths degree. What you’re doing now is useless. (he’s a maths teacher)
Me: I couldn’t do what I want to do in the future if I did a maths degree.
Dad: Rubbish, you can walk into any job with a maths degree. (what? even teaching drama?)
Me: Even if I had done a maths degree I’d have dropped out by now because I’d have found it boring.
Dad: No you wouldn’t, you’d have really gotten into it as you went along. (erm, I was already stupidly bored of it by the end of a-levels).

Tonight he had the gall to say to me that what I’m doing is easy and that if I put in an extra half hour of work I could go from a 2:1 to a first. He completely avoided the question when I asked him if he’d done what I’m doing because I’m sure if he had he’d know it’s not easy. He’s just so pig-headed that he thinks because I’m not doing an academic subject it’s a piece of piss despite the fact he’s not even attempted it for himself.

I don’t know why I bother to get wound up about it because he does it so often but I do. If anything, it’s not what he says but the frequency with which he says it. It’s just always the same once he’s been drinking and he can’t seem to change the sodding record. I would like to have decent conversations with him but that rarely happens because when he’s drunk this happens and when he’s sober, well, like I said, we have pretty much nothing in common and he often belittles what I do like. All I feel like to him is a technical support person as that’s the only time he seems to bother to talk to me, when his computer’s broken.

Anyway, the title says there’s a story so here it is:

This is about what happened at Latitude to an extent. It’s gonna be scatty and all over the place as I’ll just write things as they occur to me but deal with it.

So two weeks ago we (Sorrel, Shell and I if you’d forgotten) drove to Latitude festival and had ourselves a nice parking spot close to gate 13. We planned to camp in the yellow campsite but after walking a fair way we decided we couldn’t make it that far and settled for a spot in the red campsite. It wasn’t too bad though as it was next to a shortcut through the woods to the village and the arena entrance so we didn’t have to walk as far as we thought we would have.

By the time we got set up it was close to 5pm, when the arena was due to open. Please note, that’s due to open; not once did it open on time over the whole weekend, which is just poor planning. Anyway, we headed over to the arena entrance bought a programme, a thick book with no quick way of seeing who clashes with who (useless), for £8 and waited with everyone else for the arena to open.

Now, we wanted to go see The Now Show being recorded on the Thursday evening but this didn’t happen because the people from the BBC who were there are idiots. Like all BBC recordings it was ticketed but instead of doing the logical thing and giving the tickets to the first people to queue up for it they’d gone and wandered round the campsite, which is stupidly huge, giving them out to random people. So because of this stupid act there was little chance of us being let in so we gave up in favour of having a nosey around. I mean, the annoying thing about it all is that previous to us actually having a copy of a programme there was nothing that mentioned it being a ticketed event and had we known that we’d have made more of an effort to actually find someone who was giving out the tickets and I’m guessing it was the same for the hundreds of others who queued up with us.

Anyway, like I said, we left the queue in favour of looking round at all the stages, noting that the sheep were PINK and that the comedy tent was BIG AND PURPLE. Simple things like that keep me happy.

After a shufti at the programme and deciding there was nothing we wanted to see we headed back to the campsite and at the same time went to get our locker that we’d pre-booked. Well that turned out to be a waste of money. We turned up with an adapter from a cigarette lighter socket to a 3-pin socket as the lockers had the cigarette lighter type sockets but got told that we couldn’t use it because “it’d blow the circuit”. Now, I’m not an expert in electronics but I’m still struggling to see how a transformer could blow a circuit after all, all it does is convert what’s going in to a higher output, right? Mind you, after doing some reading around the Latitude forums when I got back, the actual power supply to the lockers was paltry and hardly provided any sort of charge for anything, which is stupid considering that’s what they would mostly be used for; I know I certainly didn’t use ours for storing my valuables.

Anyway, I think that was the general gist of Thursday. I don’t remember much else happening but then again my brain’s useless at stuff like remembering. I’ll bore you all with details of the rest of the weekend at some other point as I’m too tried to do much more of this thinking malarkey.