BIG FOOD RESCUE

Big on the Small Screen

St Peter's appeared on the television today, and may do so again this week, on BBC 1 at 9.15am, in a series called "The Big Food Rescue", which is all about The Felix Project. Readers of the Evening Standard will already be familiar with this excellent project, which collects waste food from businesses and directs it to those feeding the needy. It seems to be an idea whose time has come. This week they are getting five morning slots of documentary on BBC 1 telling their story. Needless to say, there were minor inaccuracies on the voice-over, but never mind. It did show the Lunch Club (and Jacqui) in action, which was good; the bizarre spectacle of the Lunch Club feasting on asparagus had a certain surreal quality, but fortunately they concentrated on nourishing soup, which was a bit simpler to eat. Who knows whether they will use any more of the footage they took: one of our users throwing his plate at his carer perhaps?


An Odd Encounter

I was invited to a reception in the Lord Mayor's Parlour last week, apparently nominated by the councillors, and found myself with a very assorted bunch of people. I was chatting to two locals when someone came over who asked if I was from "The True Church" (the capital letters were implied!) to which I replied that obviously everyone in my business has to think his is the true church. I assumed this was a light-hearted conversational opening, but soon found that they meant it. I wanted to think they were pulling my leg, but this just went on, and it became clear they were not joking, and obviously thought I would be pleased because the True Church, in their view, was the Church of England. Turns out that their taste is for Matins at the Abbey at a civilised hour on a Sunday, so I don't think they will be joining the flock here soon, but I came away marvelling at what some people regard as acceptable discourse. Perhaps it shows how soft and liberal I am, but I don't think claiming absolute truth for one's religious denomination is a normal feature of cocktail party conversation. In the religious melting-pot which is London, we muddle along pretty well with one another, but on the basis that none of us makes truth claims in the public space. You can assume that the practitioners of any religious system believe it to be true, and it is polite not to try to enforce your view on them, because we can live perfectly well side by side; co-existence rather than competition is the way to harmonious relations. The jihadist, of course, would take an opposing view. It might be supposed that my interlocutor would do the same, but I'm not so sure, because I think they didn't mind co-existence as long as we just patronised other faiths.


The Pastor and the Imam

So our film show will be happening on Monday, something for which we owe the (multi-faith) chaplaincy at Wormwood Scrubs a debt. The film comes from Nigeria, and is an encouraging story of reconciliation in a situation where Christians and Muslims sometimes do actually end up killing one another. It is plain that the clerics in the film (and our two friends from the Scrubs) are sincere believers, and not woolly liberals, but they demonstrate that respect and common humanity are at the heart of all religious faith. The film exists online, but we are showing it in the splendour of St Mary Mags at 6.15 on Monday 5th, with a question session and refreshments afterwards.   

THE CONCRETE AND THE CLAY

 CONCRETE CITY

One of the most obvious features of our neck of the woods at the moment is the enormous amount of concrete being transported about. Because of restrictions on turns at the Prince of Wales junction it all comes up to the traffic lights outside St Peter’s and lumbers around, gradually destroying the traffic island. This traffic comes (I presume) from the Tarmac company’s concrete batching plant next to the bus garage on Great Western Road, beside the railway, and involves both concrete mixer trucks and huge tipper trucks. Lots of concrete obviously means lots of building work; the last big spike in activity was in the early stages of Crossrail, but I think this is not destined for that scheme, which seems to be past the big concrete stage. It’s clear that the property boom continues unabated, despite recent events. You just have to look at the skyline, where you will always see cranes somewhere. Wherever you go in London there seems to be “development” taking place, with old buildings being swept away and new, shiny ones taking their place, or the existing buildings being extended or “basemented”. With all this building going on, one might ask, why do young people find it so hard to get a place to live?

Both my churches were put up during a previous building boom, in the 1860s and 70s, when, I have read, Chippenham Road was surfaced with wood blocks (I don’t think that lasted long). St Mary Magdalene’s features an early use of poured concrete, in the vault of the undercroft, a patent fireproof product, which shows how progressive the neo-gothic architects actually were. Much as I may fear and resent today’s concrete traffic (as a cyclist) I have to concede that life must have been much worse then, when there was far less regulation, and you had wooden scaffolding, steam-driven piledrivers and far more workmen. You only have to look at the photos of the digging of the Circle Line on display at Paddington Station to become aware of how ghastly it must have been. The Circle, remember, basically follows the street pattern, and was built in a huge trench dug down from the existing road; think what that would have done for traffic on Marylebone Road! Health and safety was rudimentary, and consideration for residents seems to have been very limited; you just had to put up with it as they tunnelled past your house. Meanwhile, the speculative builders were putting up whole new districts, like ours, with cheap, meanly-built housing. They look quite solid and respectable, but were often built in a hurry and ended up being let by the floor or the room as they weren't actually nice enough for the imagined target market. The planned development of Queen’s Park was a reaction to the free-for-all that had gone before, somewhere orderly and decent rather than the wild west of St Peter’s Park. It can still feel a bit like that!

THE HERON KNOWS

As I was taking a bite to eat at Clarence Gate the other day (in a break while cycling round the perimeter of Regent’s Park) I was watching the herons. I have mentioned before that there they now seem to have adapted to humans being an easy source of food, and they join the geese and gulls in looking for bread; well, on this occasion I was watching with fascinated horror as a tourist held out his hand towards a heron’s beak. Have you no imagination? Have you not seen what they do to fish? (Probably not, of course). They stab their beaks through fish a good deal thicker than your hand, so watch out, mate! Blessedly, nothing happened, but then I turned to watch one heron standing on his own in the middle of a flowerbed, stock still, classically immobile. Then a jogger came into view. She was short and extremely skinny, and dressed entirely in grey. As she came past him the heron clearly turned his head to follow her progress, as if not entirely sure that she was of a different species.

A FUNNY OLD YEAR

For All Souls’ Day we invite the families of people whose funerals we’ve done in the past year, and so I was going through my records to find the names and addresses. Now I haven’t done any more funerals than normal, but this year’s have been pretty memorable. I’ve been doing funerals for thirty years, but had never done a stillborn child until last November; and now I’ve done two. Stillbirths are not as uncommon as we suppose, but as parish clergy we tend not to do the funerals, as the hospital chaplains generally look after most of them. Fortunately I got to know the excellent Rosie at St Mary’s pretty well last summer, and so when the first one came to me last November I was able to pick her brains, and she directed me to her colleague, Michele, who specialises in this particular ministry. So, I had appropriate words to use, and it wasn’t too terrible. The more recent one, where I knew the family (slightly) and the funeral was in church, was pretty traumatic, and they remain traumatised by it all. There is clearly still work to do. So I’ve had two neo-natal deaths, and as well the funeral of a fourteen year old who died from an acute asthma attack. She was a twin, and I baptised them both and gave them their First Communion when they were altar servers, before their mum sent them to boarding school. That funeral involved a white, horse-drawn hearse, and a Pentecostal music group, but the thing that really sticks in the memory is the remaining twin sitting at a keyboard and singing a song she had written for her sister. Remarkable. Beside that, going back to Colchester to do the funerals of an old friend (aged 90), and my sister-in-law’s mother (also over 90) seemed more or less normal. As did the burial at Kensal Green of one of our most notable characters at St Mary Mag's. But it has been a funny old year.         

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.