LIGHT PERPETUAL

THE LORD LOVES A CHEERFUL GIVER

The trouble is that I’m a pretty graceless giver; I wish I could get better. On Tuesday morning I came to St.Peter’s to get ready to say Mass, and Linda, the cleaner, told me that the homeless guy was in the church foyer. He’d asked to come in and use the lavatory, and then had curled up on the easy chairs in the warm. No problem there, but I hoped he’d wake up before I was finished. Linda just cleaned around him. Then, as I was going backwards and forwards preparing the altar, a young man waiting for an appointment with the Enterprise Centre said, “Oh, sorry, there’s someone at the door for you.” So, up I go and find a local man who is known to me, brandishing doctor’s letters about an inguinal hernia, and saying he has no money for his fare to the Charing Cross Hospital and if he misses the appointment it’ll mess up his benefits. This is 9.55. I am due to say Mass at 10. I haven’t dressed yet. I haven’t opened the safe. This isn’t the best time! Ungraciously I end up making a point of bringing out my wallet and giving him a fiver “from my own money – nobody else’s”. I am mortified to realise a moment later that the young man waiting for his appointment has heard the whole conversation, and witnessed my grumpiness.

At the end of Mass, the homeless man is still asleep, and after I’ve bumbled around clearing up I have to wake him because I need to lock up. He  goes to the lavatory again and then says he’s diabetic and needs food, so I find some crisps and fruit bars and give him a fiver as well.

THANKS TO FELIX

We discovered the Felix Project a few months ago, or rather, they discovered us. They give waste food from supermarkets to groups feeding the hungry, and they have transformed our lunches. They don’t do meat, so we still have to find that, but they give us all our vegetables, and all manner of excellent extras. The only trouble is that sometimes the enthusiastic staff on the van are just too keen to shift stuff, and force food on us that we can’t realistically use. Three cartons of Rooibos tea anyone? A couple of weeks ago we had a young man making a TV film about the Felix Project who came in to see the lunch club in action, and did interviews. Whether any of it ends up being shown is quite another matter, and I wonder whether his pretty committed work is necessarily what his editors want, but we shall see (or at least we will if they warn us when it is to be broadcast).

GIVE THEM REST

Last night was All Souls’, our big occasion at St.Mary Mags. We had orchestra and choir, and about four hundred in church. We sang Fauré, in memory of Helen, and I presided in the black High Mass set that we bought in memory of Ian McPherson, a dear old Mary Mags regular a couple of years ago. I always invite families for whom we’ve done funerals in the past year, and each year some of them come and really get it. This year a young mum, who lost a teenage daughter to an acute asthma attack came, along with the daughter’s twin, and they loved it. She was absolutely blown away by the experience, which is as it is meant to be. The music, which is sublime, in that beautiful setting, and with the solemn mystery of the liturgy, takes people to a better place. We had lots of positive comments afterwards, from Warwick Estate families as from Little Venice grandees. The Music Society has been putting on a French Romantic Requiem for All Souls’ Day here for nearly fifty years, and we must be one of the very few places where it happens with full orchestra, which is really special. My mission has been to make it clear that this is an act of worship, not a concert, and so I’ve managed to get a second congregational hymn into the order, as well as making sure the order of service is designed to help people participate. We always invite people to add names to the list of departed to be read out at the intercessions, while the musicians want to suppress the list, so there’s always a little tension there. To be able to preside at All Souls’ Day at Mary Mags is a great privilege in my ministry.       

MISTS AND MELLOW FRUITFULNESS

O, GIVE ME A HOME…

We have a Harrow Road Ministers’ Fraternal, which basically means that a bunch of us meet for lunch every six weeks or so, and arrange an ecumenical service for Good Friday (the one that attracted a noise complaint this year) and another for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity (which is at the end of January). The make-up of the group is quite fluid, because it’s not as though we live in an area with clear boundaries; essentially it’s the northern half of the Anglican Deanery of Paddington (the ancient parish and former London borough of Paddington). Except that the two furthest parishes, St John’s, Kensal Green, in the west, and St Augustine’s, Kilburn Park, in the north, are not usually part of it, because they do ecumenical things with nearer neighbours in other boroughs (Kensal Town, in Kensington, and Kilburn, in Camden or Brent).

The choice of ecumenical partners is also a bit eccentric: at the heart of it is the Methodist Church in Fernhead Road (which we might call West Kilburn), whose former church is now the Maida Vale public library (in Shirland Road), which gives them a sort of sense of ownership of the whole area (and there isn’t another Methodist church for some distance). The other major partner is Our Lady of Lourdes and St Vincent de Paul, the Roman Catholic bunker on the Harrow Road, just across from Maida Hill Market, but the peculiarity there is that they are never actually represented by the parish priest; the ministers’ fraternal is attended by a Catholic layperson. We don’t include West Kilburn Baptist Chapel (a traditional-looking building on Carlton Vale, who would surely look towards Kilburn if they felt like being ecumenical) or the independent chapel on Kilburn Lane. My neighbours at Westbourne Park Baptist Church are felt to be out of the area (south of the railway) and their focus is definitely different from ours. Nor do we include my Roman Catholic neighbours on the Warwick Estate, Our Lady of Sorrows, but I’m not sure that Fr Sharbel, its Maronite priest, would find much need to work with us. We all (I think) have tenant churches who use our buildings, and we periodically talk about inviting them to things, but we all know that they wouldn't come to the Fraternal because they're all doing normal jobs as well as ministering to their congregations. We used to include the Queen’s Park United Reformed Church, in its modern building on the Harrow Road corner of Third Avenue, but sadly they have closed down; we didn’t get a chance to explore this with their last minister, who came and went quite quickly. 

So the Fraternal met the other day, at the Manse (for the very first time). The old Methodist minister, Alan, always entertained us in a room at the church, which felt very characteristic of its type, with formica surfaces and mismatched chairs, but Paul, the new man, invited us to his house.  Now the Manse is not adjacent to the Methodist church, oh no. The Manse is in Queen’s Park, but not “our” Queen’s Park, the Westminster ward of that name, basically comprising what people call “The Avenues”, the Artisans’, Labourers’ and General Dwellings Company estate of 1875-81, which is a planned estate of little gothic artisans’ cottages most of which are still social housing, and which is somewhat oddly in the W10 postcode. No, the Manse is in Queen’s Park NW6, north of the West Coast Main Line, and facing onto Queen’s Park, the Corporation of the City of London’s thirty-acre park dating from 1887. To avoid confusion, I call that Brondesbury, but estate agents insist on Queen’s Park. Anyway, Paul’s manse is a very fine late Victorian villa, beautifully presented (as the estate agents say), and he told us that he has a high court judge as a neighbour, and that the house next door went for £5.5 million the other week. The parakeets were screaming in the park. I had a sense of how the other half lives. That must actually be a bit of a challenge for Paul, who is a good guy, and thoroughly grounded. It is a charming house, but I can’t help feeling more comfortable here on the Warwick Estate.

ALL CHANGE

 The Indian restaurant across the road from St Peter’s has had a makeover, and has clearly changed hands. Opening offers are advertised. It used to be the Maida Vale Tandoori, but no longer. I saw people up ladders taking down the big white letters that proclaimed that name, and repainting the fascia board (curiously almost the same colour). I wondered what the new name would be; four letters were re-erected (almost straight) reading “Mala”. It’s a Bengali first name, but presumably means something as well, I know not what. But it rather appears that they looked at the array of letters, Scrabble-like, and made something out of what they had.

Curiously the little café in the same block has morphed, almost unnoticed, into a tiny convenience store. Perhaps its reputation will improve. William Hill shows no shadow of alteration.

FAREWELL TO ZEITA

On the last day before the half-term break we said farewell at St Mary Magdalene’s School to the remarkable Zeita, who has been working there, in various different roles, for thirty-seven years. Five years ago the Bishop of London came and dedicated a newly set-out garden at the school as “Zeita’s Garden”, and we all sort of assumed she would soon retire, but she didn’t, because she just loves the children. She has been working in the Nursery for the past few years, where her palpable faith and good nature have been invaluable in giving the children an impression of what a Christian life is meant to be about. That’s real Christian education.  Often in recent years I would see Zeita’s husband, Jody, dropping her off, having driven her over from Barking! For the farewell assembly Jody and other family members came to share the occasion, and everyone sang “The Irish Rover”. It was all terribly emotional. I took family members out to see Zeita’s Garden, and as we crossed the playground we smelt the distinctive scent of weed, presumably drifting down from the flats, but who knows? It certainly didn’t come from the garden, but it is indicative of the environment Zeita has worked in for so long. That sort of quiet devotion to the community is something you don’t see very often.

JAILHOUSE ROCK

Jailhouse Rock

My nephew decided a few months ago that he was fed up with being a land surveyor, and wanted instead to become a prison officer, so that he could help rehabilitate criminals. We all applauded this socially-useful aspiration, and wished him well. To be fair, people who know people who have been in prison reacted with satirical laughter. He has now thoroughly investigated the prison service and finds that as a  married man with children and a mortgage he simply can't afford to do it. The pay cut (to some 60% of what he's earning now) would  be too great, and it would be 5 years before he was back to a similar pay grade, and sadly family life can't sustain that. It should come as no surprise that the prison service finds it hard to attract quality applicants given how poor the pay is. It is also no surprise that corruption results. Anyone with experience of "third world" countries will testify that the first step in eliminating corruption is paying public servants well enough that they do not need to be corrupt. Do we not learn these lessons when we dish out aid?

Meanwhile the young man of our acquaintance with the gunshot wound is still on remand. The good news is: he's been moved from Wormwood Scrubs. The bad news is: he's been moved to Pentonville. Yes, that Pentonville, where an inmate was murdered last week. News reporters sounded surprised as they announced that it seemed that gang rivalries were carried on inside the gaol. Really? You'll be telling me that it's news that prisoners can get hold of drugs inside next. This is a scandal, of which the Justice Department is well aware, and about which it chooses to do nothing. There are no votes in prisoners' welfare, and worse still, you'd provoke the atavistic bile of the Daily Mail. So clearly nothing can be done.


Widower of this Parish

When the Independent ceased its print edition I stopped buying a daily paper, but began to pick up the Guardian when I went to Waitrose on a Saturday. I was a little spooked to find a column in the "Family" section headed "Widower of the Parish". This (signed "Adam Golightly", an obvious pseudonym) is an account of life as a new widower in middle age. His wife died last autumn (I think) from cancer, in her forties, she was called Helen. In other respects he is quite unlike me; he has two children (and did have a nanny) and goes abroad for work. But several of the columns have made me cry, from recognition, I suppose. I promised that this wasn't going to be a "living with cancer" blog, though it didn't really get a chance since the living didn't last very long, but now I have to promise that it won't become a "life as a widower" blog. This is just life, though I suppose widowerhood comes through occasionally.


Opus Anglicanum

As a birthday treat I went to the Victoria and Albert Museum to see the show "Opus Anglicanum", which is of English medieval embroideries, mostly ecclesiastical. Obviously I was not the only cleric there drooling and making excited little whimpers, but actually it's for the general visitor as well, and is full of extraordinary stuff, works of exquisite beauty. I was struck by how far this felt from the Harrow Road, but of course it shouldn't, because St Mary Magdalene's was built precisely to bring that sort of beauty into these gritty urban lives. We even have embroidered seraphs after the medieval pattern (6 wings, standing on wheels) because Ninian Comper was such a thorough antiquarian. My companion remarked how amazing it must have been to step out of a medieval hovel and into a church full of beautiful things, to which I responded that this was exactly what St Mary Mags was all about. People's lives today contain a lot more colour and entertainment than in the slum 150 years ago, which makes our impact less, but I think there's still an absence of real beauty, which means our amazing building still has something to say. When our conservation work is finished (in maybe 18 months' time) I suspect the colour will make an impact too, once all the paintwork is cleaned. The sense of being enfolded in the worship of heaven should become very hard to avoid.    

SLEEPERS WAKE!

When I got to the office door yesterday, hurrying to try to open up for the breakfast club in place of the organiser who had been delayed, I met not only a volunteer for the club, but also a complainer, and I’m afraid I didn’t give him the attention he wanted. This gentleman, a resident in the sheltered flats beside St.Peter’s, wanted to complain that we had a rough sleeper in the church doorway. I needed to know that this was a good neighbourhood, (hmm, matter of debate) a residential neighbourhood (not strictly true) and that this was very bad. I would have agreed that it was very bad that in a staggeringly wealthy city, in one of the richest countries on earth, some people are forced to sleep on the street, but that wasn’t what he meant. I might also have said that the rough sleeper had been in the vicinity for several days, but he’d only become noticeable when he’d come under the church porch when it poured with rain. Clearly his presence wasn’t so bad when he didn’t make the place look untidy. The rough sleeper has very little English and is some sort of refugee, which is ironic, since the gentleman complaining about him is himself the son of Jewish refugees.

Not Melodious At All

As I was crossing to the church the other day there was a tremendous racket from magpies, several of whom were swooping around. Now and again I heard a different call, once from one of the trees, and then closer, and then I saw the source of that call, a handsome jay, and it became clear that there was another one nearby. The second jay looped out of the tree and came to rest beside the first, on the planters beside the school carpark. Almost at once the magpies started to mob them, and the jays flew off. I’d never supposed that there would be this degree of aggression between jays and magpies, who are, after all, sort of cousins in the corvid family, but it was clear that the magpies objected to having the jays on their patch. Today, I spotted it happening again, in the trees on the Green.

The magpies, despite their numbers, never seem to try to impose their will on the crows which have recently appeared on the Green. At least I say they are crows, but I remember being told in Cornwall, “If ‘ee see an old rook on ‘is own, ‘a’s a crow; but if ‘ee see a load o’crows all together, they’m rooks”. They are there in quantity, but I’m pretty sure they’re crows, neater trousers and no bald patch on the face. But why are they here? They are scavengers, so where is the carrion they feed on? And why were they not on Westbourne Green in the past?  One of the favourite films of my youth was “Excalibur”, and there is an extraordinary scene in a wintry forest with the decaying bodies of knights hung from bare branches, being pecked at by rooks. One always thinks of them as crows, but from memory I’m pretty sure they are rooks (which are noticeably more unattractive). I don’t think there are any decaying medieval corpses to attract the crows to Westbourne Green, so their appearance is a bit strange. I notice that they are patrolling the grass, and probing with their big, strong beaks, so they are presumably looking for live food in the ground, so perhaps the newly turfed area contains lots of nourishing leatherjackets and worms.

Prison Chaplains

Had an excellent session with Muslim and Christian chaplains from Wormwood Scrubs this week; we are planning an inter-faith event in church. They are very impressive people. I contemplated, but in the end didn’t ask them about a young man currently inside the Scrubs, who is known to me. He’s a relation of a church member, and was recently shot by two boys on a moped, not far from here. I’m being deliberately vague, as these things have unknown ramifications. But it may have had to do with where he was, or he may have “been a naughty boy” as it has been reported. Either way, there is a whole life going on beside us of which we know nothing, only bumping up against it when it bursts in on the lives of people like my church member.  Wormwood Scrubs, despite its fame, is only a local prison these days, so it’s full of men on remand from local boroughs; the only trouble is that if someone wants to hurt this young man he has nowhere to run to now, and is intensely vulnerable. The local prison just reproduces the life on the local streets, but with all the law-abiding bits taken out. It’s all very worrying for our member.

BLURRED LINES

Blurred (Yellow) Lines

I sometimes wonder what the purpose of single yellow lines is. In Westminster it seems to be largely advisory, giving a message along the lines of, “It would be better if you didn’t park here, but if you really need to, then go ahead.” You regularly see “civil enforcement officers” as traffic wardens seem to be called now, walking past vans and commercial vehicles parked on yellow lines, and that seems to be Council policy, not to enforce parking regulations against businesses. One of the prime examples is a business on the Harrow Road which keeps a fleet of vans parked on a yellow line, which they would no doubt claim to be loading, but which observation suggests are merely parked. In fact they are gaining commercial advantage from this favourable treatment by the Council.

There’s also a general feeling that yellow lines don’t really apply later in the day. 6.30pm is the time round here when they are supposed to become free, but on the Harrow Road you’ll find people parking from 3 o’clock onwards, and in the backstreets some people seem to think they can park from lunchtime. So why does this annoy me? Simply because these vehicles cause congestion and are often dangerous as well. It’s particularly an issue of visibility for cyclists.

The latest offenders are the delivery riders, Deliveroo and the like, who park their motorbikes on double yellow lines with apparent impunity. There is a particular spot on Porchester Road where this happens constantly, where the road is narrowed by a traffic island, just before the bus stop, and a parked bike makes a real hazard.

Still, it’s better than Harlesden, which always seems particularly lawless when you drive through. I was told that traffic wardens there don’t dare to challenge illegal parking.

Va Pensiero Revisited

My regular readers will remember a previous post bemoaning the way that chain restaurants trading under an Italian label have ceased to cook Italian (or in truth any) food. Today I have cause to celebrate, because a really top class Italian restaurant has appeared almost on my doorstep. It’s called Guste Remo, and it sits on the corner opposite the Porchester Baths, in Porchester Road. It’s a rather ill-omened site, as a previous restaurant (Spanish) suffered a fire. The most recent occupant was a very well-intentioned organic, vegetarian pizza place, which just didn’t do much business. Guste Remo, on the other hand, seems busy already, and frankly is very good indeed. It’s not the cheapest around, but that wasn’t what I was looking for; I had an exquisite veal chop and we had a very leisurely evening.

Carnival Again

As I’ve said before here, street processions are significant in symbolic terms. They are expressing important meanings, as any social anthropologist will tell you, meanings around identity and ownership. I suspect that Lady Borwick MP understands that, which is why she is so keen to expel Carnival from the streets of Notting Hill. It is offensive to her and her supporters that poor black people should express any ownership of these streets. Now in fact there are still a good number of Caribbean families living in Ladbroke Grove, North Kensington and Notting Dale, though clearly there isn’t the concentration that there was in the 1960s and 70s, when most of Notting Hill was pretty run-down, and most houses were let in multiple occupancy. Many of those houses have now been converted back into single dwellings, and the remaining flats are sold these days, and if let are not let to social tenants, so the change in housing has made for a change in population, wealthier and whiter. But the fact remains that Carnival is still the cultural expression of a sizable chunk of Notting Hill’s population, who have quite as much right to be there as Lady Borwick. But that’s the point, isn’t it?

I was at a meeting recently when a policeman said of Carnival that “They’ve had fifty years of it, so it’s time to finish it.” I think I now understand what is meant by institutional racism.      

NOTHING LIKE A DAME

Nothing Like a Dame 

One of the more unusual requirements of life as a parish priest, to be photographed alongside Dame Barbara Windsor, with a Chelsea Pensioner and a train. Strictly speaking it was nothing to do with me, but by a circuitous route I got a call from a charming lady from the British Legion in Devon, who was desperate to have some sort of religious act to preface the launch of a drive for more poppy day collectors, and by chance I could be available at 36 hours’ notice and so agreed to help out. So I invented a liturgy, printed it out, and turned up in fancy dress. I had been told that they had a Chelsea Pensioner coming, as well as Royal British Legion standard bearers, so I knew it would be a uniform occasion. I have no white gauntlets or service beret, but managed an MA hood and preaching bands. Dame Barbara wore the largest, glitteriest, poppy I’ve ever seen. She was charming and devout. Everybody was muttering about how good she looks for 79. I was struck by how very small she is, even on four inch heels. It was incredibly difficult not to gaze down at her cleavage, and I was left thinking how much she must have exploited that during her career, because it unquestionably puts her at an advantage (with men, at any rate).

Spare Vicar

In fact my presence was quite redundant, because Great Western Railway has a chaplain, who came along (which was no surprise since he is, quite logically, based at Paddington Station). He very graciously agreed to take part in what I’d concocted, and I think we got on well. But I had no idea he even existed! Nor had my colleague, the Vicar of Paddington, in whose parish the station actually lies. He’s paid by the Railway Mission, of which I’d never heard either. But isn’t it absurd that we should not know about him at all! We had a diocesan study day about chaplaincy a few months ago, but I don’t think anyone mentioned the point that if chaplains aren’t Anglican then there’s no reason why you would know they were there. As we’re the Established Church we tend to assume that requests for chaplaincy will come in our direction, but if an institution has other links it will of course look there (as a Roman Catholic school or hospital will obviously do) and then there are a few long-established industrial chaplaincies which exist quite outside Anglican structures, but I had never heard of the Railway Mission. I have to say, I’m very glad the chaplain’s there, as he is obviously good at the job, and it’s good to know that there’s someone with a real knowledge of the industry who’s there to pick up the pieces.

Not Actually What He Said

After standing around the very evocative GWR war memorial (marvellous sculpture by Charles Sargeant Jagger) to pray, everyone decamped to stand in front of the locomotive power car named after Harry Patch, the last of the Tommies, for publicity photos. This power car is splendidly decked out in computer-printed vinyl with poppies and silhouettes of soldiers, and the famous words of Lawrence Binyon that we say each Remembrance Sunday. The chaplain and I took malicious glee in pointing out to the GWR Area Manager that they’d got the Binyon wrong, though. The locomotive says, “They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old…” but Binyon wrote, “They shall grow not old”. It’s poetry, you see… The general verdict was some computer auto-correct had been at work.

Making Waves

In the really hot weather this summer a magnificent wave of tarmac began to break over the kerb by the bus stop outside Betfred on the Harrow Road. I watched it grow day by day, and was slightly disappointed when I saw that it had been shaved off one day recently. This, as any urban cyclist will tell you, is not an isolated phenomenon. If there is a large pothole contractors will try to fill it with tarmac. However, tarmac does not set solid at all quickly (and in fact flexibility is meant to be a permanent characteristic) and so traffic is allowed on it before it has properly set. This matters most when you have buses standing on the tarmac, as their extreme weight simply squeezes it up. Obviously, the buses are probably responsible for the pothole in the first place. The result is the strange wrinkled surface you get at the side of many major routes in London. It’s another reason we cyclists keep out of the gutter. 

Grammar Schools

No, Mrs May, grammar schools are not the answer. I say this as an old grammar school boy, immensely grateful for the education I received, but even by my day, in the 1970s, they were ceasing to be engines of social mobility, as middle-class children were coached for the 11-plus. Nowadays the educational arms race has spiralled out of control, so tutors are the norm, and in many areas a substantial proportion of grammar school places are taken by children from independent prep schools. In contemporary conditions they won’t produce the social mobility you want, Mrs May. If you heard Justine Greening interviewed on the Today programme you will have been struck by how resolutely she evaded the question about the evidence base for doing this. I suspect that is because Ms Greening is aware of the evidence, which is absolutely clear, that if raising educational standards is what you want, then a truly comprehensive system is the answer. I know this offends what some people regard as “common sense”, but it’s true. There is an absolute international consensus that a truly comprehensive school system always produces the best results for all pupils. You can observe the results from the international comparisons, where countries like Finland and Sweden consistently do best. It is, of course, true that Sweden and Finland are also much less unequal societies than the UK, and that has all sorts of effects, not least on how acceptable comprehensive schools are to the privileged. The trouble is that we live in a society where privilege is entrenched by education, and grammar schools are part of that, because they cater to a desire to keep your children insulated from “the wrong sort”. So, no, opposition to grammar schools is not ideological (though I can’t help feeling, on reflection, that equality of opportunity is a pretty uncontentious ideology to follow) but on the evidence. They don’t work.

NO, DON'T STOP THE CARNIVAL

The Carnival is Over

It’s actually remarkable how quickly West London recovers from Carnival. Westminster Council sometimes leaves crash barriers for a couple of days, and this year TFL had left confusing temporary signs on Elgin Avenue which were still there two days later, but mostly it went very quickly, and of course the councils make sure the rubbish is removed very quickly indeed. You meet people who are shattered, having spent Bank Holiday Monday dancing all day, and see others who are clearly not up to social interaction yet thanks to their Monday intake. Generally, though, the most noticeable residue is a general feeling of goodwill.

This Year Was Different

Only this year the goodwill (and lots of people were saying that it was the best Carnival for years) was punctured by the Police Federation moaning about Carnival. They pointed to 450 arrests, which is a lot, until you compare it to the number of arrests at other large-scale events (Glastonbury Festival, for instance) to which the arrests are quite proportionate. It’s also not the case that an arrest means that a crime has taken place. People this year certainly saw individuals arrested for apparently no reason, and we all know that when a crime has certainly taken place many people are arrested for the purposes of investigation but never in fact charged. Nor is it quite as horrifying that a number of policemen were taken to hospital when you learn that several of them were taken to hospital because someone spat on them. Now that’s not to say that spitting is acceptable, but it’s a misleading statistic. The Metropolitan Police themselves pointed out that the number of arrests this year could be expected to be higher than in the past because they were enforcing the new Psychoactive Substances Act (which recently banned what were previously known as “legal highs”). Since the streets of Notting Hill were peppered with nitrous oxide canisters it is no surprise that this resulted in a number of arrests. What was different this year was that the Metropolitan Police Federation felt able to decry Carnival (perhaps emboldened by the post-Brexit mood, which apparently licenses being rude to foreigners and people of colour).   

Constituencies

We know that the MP for Kensington, Lady Borwick, wants to close Carnival down. She has made that very clear, and sent out a nasty “survey” to constituents inviting their complaints earlier in the year. I don’t doubt that lots of wealthy Notting Hill residents would much rather have the Carnival go away, and probably I would hate it if I lived on the route, but then I would either join in or go away for two days, which is in fact what many residents do. But Carnival is not unique: the same problems are faced by residents of Twickenham, for instance, albeit on a smaller scale, but much more frequently. I’m sure that a section of Lady Borwick’s constituency wants to be rid of Carnival as an inconvenience, but she should be aware that lots of businesses regard it as a gilt-edged opportunity. She clearly doesn’t care about her constituents who enjoy Carnival (of whom there are many, of all backgrounds) but you would suppose that she might worry about what businesses thought. It’s worth pointing out that Karen Buck, the other MP whose constituency is part of Carnival, is a consistent supporter of the event.

Success Story

It seems to me that Lady Borwick (and the Police Federation) should be celebrating the success of Carnival, which is the second-biggest street festival in the world, and which attracts tourists in large numbers. Did you not see them? Foolishly festooned with cameras and photographing the most mundane things? More than ever this year. That is because it is generally peaceful and cheerful. People enjoy it. People (in huge numbers) come to London to enjoy it. It shows off the diversity of London in a pretty authentic way. When it started 50 years ago it was a chance for West Indian people to gain some self-respect by celebrating their culture in an environment which had greeted them with racism, and that story still needs to be heard. But it’s more than that today, as the samba bands demonstrate (not Caribbean at all) and as a glance at the participants will show. Vast numbers of young people regard the music being played at Carnival as their own, whatever their background, and they are happy to take part, and are welcome to do so. This is a reflection of the London that most of us enjoy living in, cosmopolitan, multi-cultural, vibrant and full of artistic endeavour, the London which is the world city that most people seem to want to live in. That is surely a success, and something that should be celebrated, not moaned about.