I an I Rastafari

ST LUKE'S: Two people got shot at the Notting Hill Carnival over the weekend as I celebrated my first bank holiday weekend in Londres for a year. I can safely say I wasn't one of those two people. But I did brave the crowds to hit up both days of the carnival, trying the jerk at two different stalls. As a connieseur of the stuff though (it helps living around the corner from half a dozen Carribean takeaways in Brixton), I have declare that it wasn't quite up to scratch. But then bad jerk chicken is like bad pizza, it's never that bad.

Most of Sunday's session was spent chilling at the church. Flo, Louise, Joe and friends had their stall on again and in exchange for first class views of the parade from the specially erected balcony, I hawked the odd can of Coke here and the odd icy water bottle there. But that did leave me with plenty of time to check out the parade. The children's parade seems to be an ad-hoc, rambling affair full of wide eyed children in costumes being chaperoned by their parents. The main parade on the Monday is a much more corporate affair. For instance we saw a Corona truck complete with promo girls, prize winners and dancing Corona bottles. The rest of Sunday was spent chilling out to sound systems, while on Monday I mounted another ill fated attempt to see Flo's band Burn Brothers, though after spending almost an hour fighting my way from Notting Hill to Westbourne Park I discovered that the performance was cancelled. Something to do with the pedal powered stage, literally, being unable to compete with the zillion watt sound systems parading past.

So that's another carnival gone. It's my last one, on this trip at least, and come then end of next August when I'm cowering inside trying to dodge the horrid westerlies that plauge Brisbane in it's coldest month, I'll look longingly back at this feast of jerk chicken and dub rhythms and shed a tear.