Note: This post was edited on 9/11/2016 to correct a mistake and add some information.

Today was the start of the annual school festival at the school our oldest attends.

She participated in the opening ceremony, but first we had to wait because it turned out that the festival didn’t open until 11 although we were told it would open at 10. Although we had to wait, we did get good spots to see our oldest play and the flag team perform.

No pictures or video though, that’s one of the rules.

Once we got inside we got our parent badges which granted us permission to take photos and videos inside the school. Members of the public without badges are forbidden from taking pictures.

This is because the members of the public included a large group of fairly suspicious looking men who appeared to be there by themselves and a surprisingly large troupe of police watching the outside. I’m not sure if the two things were connected, but this school has enough historical tradition behind it that, oddly, it has attracted its own class of perverts called “******mania” (Note: the asterisks conceal the school’s nickname not the word this father would use for them.)

Think of someone with a fetish for Catholic school girls in uniform–and you know who you are–and you’ll get the idea.

After getting our badges, we went in search of ice cream. Each homeroom puts on some kind of display. That can be selling and serving sweets or hosting silly carnival games. We had ice cream, then cookies, then played a game and had a student demonstrate a really cool touch-screen digital globe.

The main complaint I had, and this also applies to the festival at the school where I work, is that only sweets or instant ramen noodles can be served. Nothing that can go bad is ever served, which means no hot dogs, hamburgers or chicken. Also, although some drinks were offered coffee was not.

I eventually ran away to escape the crowd. I never did actually get a chance to see our oldest, which meant I never got a chance to embarrass her directly in front of her friends.

Unfortunately I can’t be there tomorrow when there will most likely be a larger crowd. The festival is one part advertising and one part inviting boys from other high schools to meet the girls. (It is an all-girls high school after all.)

Perverts and teen-aged boys. A father really ought to be there for that.