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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 | Comments (0)
Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds? Hmm
Home thoughts from abroad are supposed to be pleasant. However beautiful the part of France or Spain we have stayed in for the summer holidays, however scented the warm breezes, I have always thought happily of England, and been glad to come home. Sometimes, walking on the baked red earth among the chestnut trees and cork trees, I have even missed the green damp of Britain.
So when it is time to come home, I am quite content for the last rays of the Mediterranean summer sun to give way to the more subtle beauties of the English autumn. (I say English only because I live in England; in no way do I mean to exclude the beauties of the Welsh, Irish or Scottish autumn, or of any other country's, or of the Cornish summer, either; like the Prime Minister, I try to be inclusive and non-discriminatory, not least about the weather.)
But this summer, for the first time, my home thoughts from abroad have not been very pleasant. Fortunately they have been few, since not many British or international newspapers make their way to this part of Andalucia, and the telephone connection here is erratic enough to keep us away from our laptops and the internet news. But occasionally someone arrives from the airport with a bundle of English papers. How the heart sinks. And how the blood boils.
I saw, to my horror, that John Birt is to go to Downing Street as some sort of something important; I could not bear to read on. Nor could I face the discussion of Margaret Jay's chances of getting hold of the entire BBC. It is too hot here for that kind of shock.
And there ought to be a health hazard attached to holiday portraits of Cherie Blair grinning maniacally, with her arms ostentatiously wound round her grimacing husband, who meanwhile, according to headlines, has "broken off" his holidays to help save a bone marrow girl. The worst of this shameless, cynical posturing is that it seems to work.
Any piece of news or comment about the Conservative Party is also enough to make me feel quite faint: the whole subject is depressing, not least because it gives all our unconservative friends who come to stay such tremendous, contemptuous merriment. It's almost like being a communist apparatchik at the height of glasnost.
Then there has been some sort of sanctimonious nonsense about Brass Eye, and the trial by press of the Hamiltons, and the compulsive picking over of the private life of the Prince of Wales. The unthinking, prurient injustice of it all - and the Government's unthinking, ceaseless intrusion - make me begin to feel a faint sympathy with my husband's plan to live in Spain. At least they are nice about the King here; that may not mean much in itself, but it suggests a sophisticated, civilised world view that is disappearing from Britain.
However, when I was holding forth in this Eeyore mood this week, claiming that everything is going wrong in Britain and that there are at least 27 reasons not to go home, everyone suddenly began to turn Pollyanna and attack me. Everyone means about 14 people around a shady Andalucian table, and nearly all of them were claiming that we in Britain have never had it so good.
It is not only that we have bifocal contact lenses and ready-washed designer lettuce in bags and cash dispensers and thickly filled sandwiches and text-messaging and are richer than ever before: it is also that even the things we complain about are actually improvements.
The devaluation of A-levels, for instance, (it was explained to me) is an excellent thing. A-levels are indeed now very much easier, and some of the questions of today are the O-level questions of yesterday. But that means that those of us who passed A-levels a long time ago can feel very smug, and much cleverer than the young, who might be inclined to patronise us; meanwhile, it is much easier for our children to get into some sort of university.
At the same time, the devaluation of almost all university courses (see above) means that you no longer really need to do one, and, if your children aren't very bright, you can simply tell them - which is true - that it is now becoming cool not to go to university at all.
A cheering headline in the Guardian - how odd to be consoled by the Guardian - made this very point. A Californian friend tells me that having a degree is actually a handicap in the creative world of Hollywood, since all the successful types there are dyslexic or have learning difficulties or something, and don't much like exam passers, who are often thought of as "anal".
And that is all to the good, because, since YPT (Young People Today) have short attention spans and want to do something creative but not anal, their general lack of education will only help them on their way. Accountancy and law and tedious, heavy work such as that can be left to recent immigrants, which, according to recent examination lists, they seem to be willing to take on in immense numbers - so that's all to the good, too.
As for the emasculation and/or the feminisation of Westminster, that is all for the best as well. Politicians have always been frightful, and now they are getting worse (see collapse of moral and educational standards generally, as above).
So the growing irrelevance of Westminster forces politicians into the outer darkness where they belong and cannot trouble us. (There are some exceptions, of course - brilliant but deluded young men and women, often Telegraph writers, who do not yet realise they could serve their country better in other ways.) So things could hardly be better, really.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, August 18, 2001 | Comments (0)
