Having the great good fortune to live on the route of the Notting Hill Carnival, and to enjoy the event - we have been here for more than 30 of them now and I am the grandly-titled trustee of a costume band - I have the annual task of having to remove my car from in front of the house and stash it down a side street out of the way.
One normally does this on the Saturday night, otherwise over-keen authorities may appear on Sunday morning before one is awake and lift the thing, which may then be hard to find.
The problem with the side streets on either side of the house is that one is a plod-designated emergency vehicle route, kept absolutely empty, and I am superstitious about the other having had one car robbed there and another stolen never to be seen again.
A couple of percussion groups passed early this morning, the first before 8 a.m. Now it is quiet, the weather clement, people gathering in the street for today's 'children's parade', a quieter dry run for tomorrow's real thing. That will pass in a miasma of rum, weed and glorious clamour. People will come to the house. On Tuesday the streets will be physically dirty but spiritually clean, evil spirits having been thrust back for another year. It will be my birthday, a third day of knees-up, hooray!
Just hope I'll be able to remember where I left the jalopy. Not that I'll care much, the state I hope to be in.
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Oh yes, another treat (fingers crossed): the Turkish Grand Prix in an hour or so.
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I've got a mate in London who's lucky enough to enjoy the Carnival from his living room. Fantastic. Not a good time of year to be a chicken though.
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Sounds great if you like that sort of thing. Enjoy the next few days.
Hawkeye
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Stranger in a strange land
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Happy birthday, Lud, and thank you for all your words of wisdom!
May there be many more!
--
e Prof
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Happy Birthday Lud.
I hope by then you've found the car.
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And a very good race it was.
Steel bands are very motoring related. Apart from the fact that pans are sophisticated instruments - a good steel orchestra can make a good fist of sounding like a symphony orchestra, strings and all - made from crude oil drums by stretching the ends with a variety of special hammers - one of the most important instruments in a steel band is brake drum. A band passed earlier with five or six of them, all different sizes, the biggest from a truck, with a bloke playing each of them furiously with a couple of bolts or other suitable pieces of steel.
Hard on the ears, that all day long.
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And thank you for kind wishes. I didn't mention it for that reason, just got carried away.
Kind of you.
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Yeah yeah! If you think I'm buying you a pressie though...
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How on earth does one become trustee of a costume band? Sounds fun!
Happy birthday!
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It is fun stevied, although my duties are far from onerous. One does it by being in the right place at the right time.
Found the jalopy yesterday after the usual anxious wander around. It was further away than I remembered leaving it.
Carnival was its usual wonderful self. Seem to be a few more steel bands around. Takes a lot of work and practice, so the middle-aged always fear that the spoilt young aren't up for it any more. But they are, thank goodness, and it's definitely the best music to be heard at Carnival. The most danceable and downright bad, with the most soul. But that is not to say that the HGV-mounted sound systems aren't worth listening to. Carnival is a parade of leading-edge Afro-Caribbean schlock music, as the thousands of followers some of the systems pick up testify. You hear some of the weirdest noises on the planet put out at 1,000 decibels.
However the really big bass speakers featured a few years ago seem to have faded away. They were huge horns that were placed face down on flatbed trucks, liooked like supertanker mooring bollards. When they did their thing, fortunately for only a few bars at a time, you could put your hand on the inside of the front wall of our 1840s six-storey house and feel it pulsing. The bolts on the inside of the 3cwt. front door would rattle, and plaster and paint flakes would detach themselves from here and there and flutter down. Pity in a way, but probably best for the physical integrity of London's period housing stock.
Hope I'm still alive next year, provided Livingstone hasn't messed it up (he's trying).
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