Don’t let terror threat ruin the best of the fests

As you read this on Sunday morning, I’ll be waking up at Glastonbury for, I think, about the 20-somethingth time.

I first went in 1993, when I’d not long graduated and was covering it for Scotland’s

It’s been boiling hot. The other day in the car I saw that the thermometer had topped 33.5 degrees down here in l ea f y Buckinghamshire.

Because I am old, I always have to convert temperatures to Fahrenheit before they mean anything to me.

Anything in the high 60s or low 70s is nice, warm weather.

Anything in the 80s is really getting a bit hot and anything in the 90s is crazy mental, tar-boiling, strip- off- and- lie- in- thegarden weather.

Well, 33.5 degrees Celsius is about 93 Fahrenheit: officially crazy weather.

And when the mercury rises, it does funny things to people’s brains. First there’s the Englishmen…

There was the British fruit farmer on the news who said that heat had been great for his strawberries but his business was on the verge of being destroyed.

Why? Because he voted for Brexit and now feared he wouldn’t be able to get enough fruit pickers from eastern Europe to come and pick his crops.

Because no Bri t ish workers would take the late, lamented Tennent’s Live News magazine.

And, barring the years the festival takes off and little things like the birth of my daughter, I’ve been every year since.

This year was the first time my mum ever said to jobs. That’s right – a man whose business model depends on migrant labour from the EU freely admitted on national television that he voted to leave the EU and destroy his own business.

The sun must have boiled his brain.

Speaking of Brexit, Tory Brexit negotiator David Davis took off for Brussels last week to formally begin our withdrawal.

He said he was going to achieve “a deep and special partnership between the UK and the EU – a deal like no other in history”.

All of this despite the facts that all the other EU nations have already (and rightly) told us to get bent and that Davis and his team are about as prepared going into this negotiation as I was going into my O Level arithmetic exam in 1983 – me, “Oh, you’re not going, are you?”

“Why not, mum?” I asked her. “The terrorists.” It never even crossed my mind not to go.

If we all start doing that, what kind of festivals are which was another boiling hot summer.

Quite simply, the sun must have poached Davis’s brain, just like it did mine back in the day. (I got a D, by the way, which is an optimistic appraisal of the kind of deal we’re going to get in Brussels.)

And then there’s the mad dogs…

Donald Trump made a rare speaking appearance last week.

Not in an interview or at a press conference of course – he hasn’t done one of them in months and will not do one in the foreseeable future. (Unless it’s with someone at Fox News who will ask him tough questions like, “What colour are your socks?” Not really tough ones Trump couldn’t answer l ike, “Should you take your we going to have left? Ones run by the Daily Mail and with a line-up featuring Katie Hopkins, Nigel Farage and Jim Davidson?

I can see that kind of thing any time on Question Time.

That’s right – America finally has a president who stood up there and said to people: “The sun. It is hot.” (I’d say again that the sun must have fried his brain but, as you all well know, there isn’t really a lot to fry there. Frying Trump’s brain would be like frying a single pea. Not really worth the effort, is it?)

When you think about it, the heat is responsible for a lot of lunacy, isn’t it?

The outbreak of World War I and II, the 9/11 attack, the Brexit vote, the national outpouring of crazed grief that fol lowed Princess Diana’s death – all of these things happened in the summer.

I f we could just get through to the end of S e p tember w i t hout another act of total lunacy, that would be just fine by me.