AN ENTIRE summer has been cancelled. It’s heartbreaking but the only redeeming feature is the fact that everyone — or at the very least everyone who has access to a computer and a level of technical knowledge beyond that of a bemused triceratops — can be at the Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Festival.

I heartily recommend you log in and watch, wherever you are and whatever the weather is like and whether or not you like festivals, camping, mud, stubbornly convex toilet facilities, stoned hippies, welcoming pools of sick and random people asking if you want to buy horse tranquilliser, etc.

I know most of that doesn’t happen at Tolpuddle — it’s just my memories of 40 years of festival experiences rolled together for your amusement.

Because this year the festival facilities are down to you. You don’t even have to get out of bed if you’ve got a laptop.

As always at Tolpuddle there is the annual procession through the village, loads of discussions and workshops and huge amounts of brilliant music.

You’ll probably know the headliners — Eliza Carthy and Billy Bragg — and there’s Swill Odgers and Paul Simmonds from The Men They Couldn’t Hang, award-winning country singer Naomi Bedford, tap-dancing punk Rory McLeod,  brilliant radical songwriter Robb Johnson, Steve White and his Protest Family, fantastic poet Janine Booth, the incredible inspirational activist Joe Solo, Quiet Loner Mat Hill, amazing Anglo-Pakistani punk-folk maestro Babar Luck and quirky Scottish bard Elvis McGonagall.

But I want to give a special mention to the new breed — the clever, passionate and acerbic Black Country singer-songwriter Jess Silk, piano balladeer Maddy Carty, bilingual Welsh punk-folker Efa Supertramp, brilliant wordsmith Potent Whisper and my local East Worthing & Shoreham CLP’s house band, the  rabble-rousing Bats Feet. All details are at facebook.com/groups/tolpuddlemartyrs

In my last column I mused on those who don’t care whether they catch the virus or not. But, believe it or not, there are people who actually try and get it.

A 30-year-old man has died after attending a “Covid-19 party” in Texas. This is apparently a gathering organised when one of a “conservative” group is diagnosed with the disease, to show that the virus is a hoax. I’m not making that up.

Isn’t it amazing how the meaning of the term “conservative” has changed in recent times?

The “small-C” adjective has always been subtly different from the “big-C” noun but now they are different worlds.

When I was growing up, aspiring to be “conservative” meant wearing a suit when you didn’t have to, trying to copy the way people spoke on the radio, putting doilies on the dinner table — what the fuck were they for? — trying to be friends with someone you thought might be a Freemason and going to church as an act of street credibility.

Now it means getting banned from Twitter for spouting rude racist garbage if you are in in Britain or, in the US, worshipping Confederate generals, walking round with a rocket launcher strapped to your testicles and ostentatiously catching fatal viruses to show how hard you are.

At least Hyacinth Bucket wasn’t contagious and you couldn’t catch the plague from a serviette — or was it a napkin?

Keep the aspidistra flying. Or not.

And keep your spirits up and stay safe.