Notting Hill Diary

  

Some nice flowers

As anyone who’s seen the news in the since Monday knows, Carnival ended on a slightly sour note for those unlucky enough to be caught on one part of Ladbroke Grove at around 8:30pm on Monday.

A dumb end to a great day
We’d all had a fantastic day. The gig was great and we had intended to leave immediately afterwards to get to Don’s barbecue, but we realised even as we were playing that this was going to be impossible because of the shear numbers of people, well up on last year, on Talbot Road between us and the flat on Powis Terrace in which we planed to leave our guitars, so we stayed to watch The Trojans (with Prince Buster) and to hear Natty Bo spinning records till the end.

  

Relaxing

As the crowds cleared we dropped of our gear, then using our local knowledge we decided to take a back route as far as possible to avoid the crush of people leaving. That route took us to the very top of Portobello Road. Meanwhile, unknown to us, a stand off that had been developing between the Police and about 40 “youths” (according to reports) had errupted into actual violence on Ladbroke Grove.

Using our local knowledge to walk into trouble
Our “clever” route took us through a housing estate the joins the top of Portobello Road to Ladbroke Grove just south of Sainsburys. Had we walked straight up Ladbroke Grove, we would have ben stopped some 40 yards earlier by a line of Police vans. As it was, we emerged slap bang in the midle of the gap between the Police and a group of what we quickly realised, was a group of bottle throwing morons.

  

A cat

Pass the bottle
The first bottle that landed 3 feet away from me I mistook for one that had fallen off the window ledge of one of the flats behind us from under which we’d just walked. As another, and yet another smashed down near us with a strangely satisfying crunch, we realised what was going on and Wifey, Mick, Gary, my cousin Martin and a couple of other friends ran as fast as we could towards Sainsburys.

I dearly wish I had some video of us running if only because I somewhat resembled David Niven in Around the World in Eighty Days, top hat ‘n’ all. Part of me thinks I should have calmly walked out of it.

We’d barely escaped when someone shouted “They’re coming this way!” and we hoofed it again.

Postcode wars?
The strange thing was that in the midst of the rampage we could hear people shouting out local postcodes. I clearly heard “W12″ and I’m pretty sure “W2″ was also represented. Had we become involved in some bizarre postocde war? If so I was quite prepared to say “Hmm. You make a very cogent point sir. Your postocde is indeed superior to mine and I declare you the winner”. Would have sounded good, dressed as I was.

Dr Livingstone I presume
As we moved further towards the end of Ladbroke Grove, there were Police standing in, I guess, chevron formation, funnelling us all to the sides of the road. I think there were three or four such lines of Police and at the second, one of them stopped me briefly and said “Dr Livingstone I presume”. The next day friends and I both agreed that the policing at Carnival had improved no end over the last 30 years.

Won’t stop me going to Carnival though.