Last updated at 14:17, Thursday, 31 May 2012

Summer officially starts this weekend in the Green household.

We will be celebrating it by taking in not one but TWO of Cumbria’s best events – the Ireby music festival and the Whitehaven Festival.

In a short space of time and due to a fair bit of imagination and hard work, Ireby has established itself as one of the friendliest and most laid-back of all small festivals.

While the music focuses on folk and traditional, that often stretches into blues or pop, Cajun, country, and world, or just something unexpected and interesting.

There is always something for everyone and the whole village gets involved.

Which makes it all the more shocking and more than a little pathetic to learn that the event has been hit by sneak thieves who have stolen the support poles from a festival marquee to sell as scrap metal. They will probably only fetch a quid or two, hardly worth the bother of stealing them.

And certainly a lot less than it will cost the organisers of the festival to replace them, and fix them back in.

Just for this year, the Whitehaven Festival has been renamed the Diamond Jubilee Festival.

There’s a great music line-up, but while I’ll be trying to get some cooking tips from TV chefs Ainsley Harriott and Jean-Christophe Novelli, my young ’uns will be dragging me off to see the ships, the Red Arrows and the other plane fly-pasts, Titan the robot and the funfair...

First published at 11:27, Thursday, 31 May 2012
Published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk