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Here for Notting Hill Carnival, but wishing I was still in Spain
This year, for the first time, I have a bad feeling about the Notting Hill Carnival, which starts today. For 20 years or more, we have lived in the middle of carnival territory, and I have always had a certain affection for it. This is despite the fact that I hate crowds, can't stand the noise or the smells and that any local people with any sense board up their houses and go away if they can.
We often do so ourselves, and go to southern Spain, where the fiestas are in every way more civilised. But there have been many times when we have stayed and joined the crowds at the end of our street; I have always felt, somehow, that I ought to enjoy it, if only in a literary way. Charles Dickens would have enjoyed it, for instance.
Despite the fearful noise - I can usually feel the reverberations of the music in our floorboards through the soles of my shoes, even with doors and windows closed - there is, or always has been, a real sense of event, a sense of fun.
The general mood always seems relaxed: people smile as they wander about with beer cans, eating food from street stalls and cheerfully dispersing litter or smoking dope. Huge armies with grungy T-shirts and extensive body piercing line both sides of Ladbroke Grove to watch the enormous carnival floats proceeding past, hour after hour.
There is dancing in the smaller streets, if dancing is the right word for the overt, if clumsy, simulation of sex that people go in for: where there's room enough to shake your booty, hundreds of thousands of booties get ineptly shaken.
The numbers are astonishing. About two million people descend for three days on a very small part of Notting Hill - in no sense is all this local any more, except in the planning. And what an acrimonious can of worms that is. For three days, the neighbourhood is taken over by swarms of people so dense that it is almost impossible to walk through them. It is not safe to let children wander about unaccompanied, or to let go a small child's hand, even for a minute.
The intense din must surely be unsafe, too; I come away deafened, with my ears ringing and my heart pounding. In such a state of excitement, the crowd seems to have an impersonal will of its own; it may allow you to move, or it may not. I can never help wondering what would happen to the will of this vast throng if its mood changed.
It may be, I admit, that my own change of mood about the carnival has something to do with my experience of two years ago. I was in our basement, putting some clothes in the washing machine, to the throbbing of the drums outside, when I noticed a loud trickle of water in the wrong place - obviously the plumbing had gone wrong while we were away, as plumbing always does.
The noise seemed to be coming from the door into the basement area. When I looked through the door's glass panels, I was suddenly confronted, fully and frontally, with the source of the flow; a hugely tall and cool young man with awesome dreadlocks, only inches away from me on the other side of the glass. He laughed at me, deliberately peeing against my door. I banged crossly on the glass, but he only laughed harder, gave himself a little shake, adjusted his clothes and leapt off into the gathering din.
That rather took the shine off things. Lots of people who live here are disgusted by the sight and smell of human urine and faeces on their doorsteps or front gardens, and that is to say nothing of the less revolting debris of the carnival.
The litter is truly astonishing. I have never seen anything like it, anywhere in the world, at any festival. Shopkeepers feel forced to board up their shop fronts and, increasingly, ordinary householders are doing it as well. People always say that there isn't much trouble, considering the vast numbers of people. But that may be because of the heavy - and very expensive - police presence.
This year, there will be 10,000 policemen and women on duty, 1,500 more than last year; it will cost the public pounds 4 million, more than the policing of any other event, including the Millennium celebrations and Diana's funeral. Even so, with all this police power, there were two deaths and 19 stabbings last year, quite apart from the mugging, pocket-picking and steaming that no one bothers to report. This year the police are said to be alarmed about the possibility of armed gangs turning up, to say nothing of the risks of being crushed.
What is all this for? And for whom? The old answer would have been that it is for fun. It is worth putting up with a bit of mess and inconvenience for that. Other people would answer that it is largely for celebrating Afro-Caribbean identity, though personally I have always felt that is rather divisive.
Now I am beginning to feel that the answer is becoming uncertain. The cost to the public has become immense, and there is a new sense of racial tension in the air, in some cities at least; even here, at last year's carnival, a young Asian man was killed by some Afro-Caribbeans, apparently without any provocation. There is also a growing sense of menace about Yardie gangs and similar organised crime.
And with heat, drink, dope, youth, sex and crowds, the Notting Hill Carnival is a potential tinderbox. I have a bad feeling about it. I hope I'm wrong.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, August 25, 2001
