Carnie

There are plenty of people who tut and shake their heads, who point to the violence and the high costs associated with policing of the event (Indeed the righteous opprobrium, such as I overheard between two office workers the other lunchtime - "two stabbings... Well, I’m sorry, but.." - fuelled by the very thinly veiled racism in the Sun and the Daily Mail, could be said to have watered down the spirit of the thing over the years. For at each Carnival, there seem to be more police involved, fewer freedoms as a result of the strict marshalling, and of course the ever-present curse of the modern world - surveillance everywhere. I feel less in danger than when I first started going - though that could just as easily be about my own maturity as it is about the protection of PC Plod...) but I'll have none of that.

Carnival is a glorious shout of self expression from London’s black communities; a splendid and magnificent display of pride and vigour of which anyone who lives in this metropolis should be hugely proud, and in which everyone should participate for as long as they feel able. This year, as last, I felt able, and I don’t regret a moment of it.

Although I do think it’s a struggle for young children who are not actually in the carnival parade itself. There are just too many people and not enough space. If it were me, I would be absolutely terrified of losing the kids, and there would be no way I could enjoy the day (I’m not sure they would either) but I am especially heartened by the sight of older people throwing themselves into the spirit of the thing.

Perhaps it makes me feel a little less guilty about indulging when I have reached such a responsible age.

A young girl in full costume sits on the side of a float lorry, her eyes half-lidded and an almost empty bottle of E&J in her hands. Her large breasts are pushing out of the top of her feather-adorned bra top. Someone tells her to adjust herself, but she only succeeds in making things worse. An old man wearing a cannabis leaf scarf with a long greying dread snaking down his back rolls and smokes a spliff, smiling coolly, beatifically, as he walks slowly alongside the truck which blasts out a chest vibrating beat while the followers bob or thrust inside the ropes behind.

People sitting on balconies or squatting on pillar boxes with a million plastic cartons, chicken bones, corn cobs, brandy bottles, Rizla card and beer cans strewn on the ground beneath them. A middle-aged woman - undoubtedly a mother, but perhaps also a civil servant - grinds in the middle of the road. Against the odds, people meet in the throng, throwing their arms around each other and exchanging a few words. Groups of pensioners sit in doorways sipping Red Stripe, suddenly rising to their feet as a particular beat catches them.



Professional photographers are intent only on their shots, stepping into the road before an extra vibrant, or extra sexy dancer and then moving on, their cargo of images intact, and immune to the swirl of music and human joy and grass and alcohol all around them. A teenage boy in only shorts and a t shirt lies foetal behind the low wall of a church, his hair dripping with bits of twig and soil.

Long roads lined with their expensive white houses and black balconies carry vast numbers of revellers while clouds of smoke from all the little barbies form a single heavy heat haze overhead. The smoke seems to be feeding into the clouds above and carries the aromas of chili sauce ‘on its breath’. Severe faced armoured coppers sporting blue corded earpieces suddenly emerge walking purposefully, staring everyone down as they move towards their target. Impossibly dense crowds gather around a sound stage and watch a man dressed as a giant pineapple bobbing on a scaffold outside a cafe. The police are nervous, and for a moment the MC teases with the threat or promise of an encore, before dissolving the crowd in its own whistling by turning off the speakers.

Yet how quickly the smell of smoke fades, how the horns and whistles are left behind, and how easily ‘normal’ London returns. The Carnival signals the end of summer of course. A last hurrah before the long and enervating slide to Christmas.

A walk to Paddington, a tube journey, and then it’s almost as if you weren’t there. Testament to the city’s resilience that such an enormous public event as the Notting Hill Carnival can so easily be folded into its skin.

Tidied Out or James the Less

A stonking weekend in Oswestry has illustrated most clearly the pleasure-pain principle. Or - as Laurence Fishburne said in the dreadful remake of Assault On Precinct 13 which was shown on TV last night - the Greeks called it Eros and Thanatos.

I forgot about my worries for a while and just plain old enjoyed myself. Whether to do with the moon or other pagan attributes associated with this time of year (admittedly, it is just a little early) rather than of the month, a remarkably upbeat atmosphere was evident in the sleepy little market town, with a free 'festival' (a few fairground rides and a stage, but I'm not complaining) on Friday night, and much carousing till late into the night most nights. Even the winter weather did not seem to dampen anyone's ardour, and I laughed a good deal. It was, in short, tidy.



I will confess to no more or less than some of our elected leaders (past and present) when I say that I may have tried some illegal (though, as we know, this definition is a fluid one, in both a temporal and geographical sense) substances in the past, and I was shocked to find, whilst out on a country ramble, a viable crop of psilocybin flourishing atop Hen Dinas' venerable crown. Whether I picked any must remain open to conjecture, as must the burning question of ingestion - in that will I be able to? Notwithstanding the practical difficulties of a decent 5 hour window, there is also the terror of gazing into my now matured (I use the word advisedly, let me assure you) psyche with its attendant baggage of responsibility and paranoia.

But for now, it's back to reality. I have already crashed and will soon start to burn, faced as I am with the ongoing quest for avoiding switching on the TV, and desperately trying to get motivated to do something other than play Super Mario Brothers on the DS.

Tripitaka

For fear of boring anyone, or of being accused of fishing for sympathy, this will be the last mention of my cluster headaches, which are (I keep telling myself) surely on their way out by now. I did have an attack or two yesterday, but they were relatively brief and less intense than they have been, so I am somewhat hopeful. Only time will tell. Tick tock.

In any case, I have been intrigued when - during the last cluster over two years ago - I came across the use of sumatriptan as a palliative in my research. Intrigued because of what one might I suppose call a misspent youth (though it was - mostly - a lot of fun at the time) and an indulgence in those fungi which can tend to bend the mind rather. Sumatriptan, you see, is derived from a compound found in magic mushrooms, and many sufferers have reported that it is particularly effective both in combatting the headaches when they hit, and in delaying their onset, or in prolonging the time between episodes.

Now that the government, in its infinite wisdom as regards drugs, has declared the psilocybin mushroom to be illegal, it is very difficult to get hold of any. The organisation Cluster Busters has resources for procuring spore kits, but I fear that a mushroom farm would not go down too well in the flat, what with the kids around, and the almost total lack of any area in which to cultivate the little buggers, so it looks as if this will be one prospective medicine with which I will not be able to avail myself. On top of that, I'm not sure if I could actually handle taking mushrooms again. It was bad enough when I had nary a care in the world, but with the weight of the years upon me, and the burden of life's responsibilities, I am fairly sure that my brain would explode with the sheer cosmic-ness of it all.

I do wonder how many of the pointy caps my fellow cluster sufferers imbibe, because I'm damned sure you wouldn't want to be tripping with a skull-splitting headache, so I'm guessing 10-15 would probably suffice. I also wonder about tolerance levels, and whether that is a problem for those poor souls who are chronic sufferers (I'm talking several headaches a day, with perhaps a couple of hours in between, and EVERY SINGLE DAY of the year) meaning that they have to keep upping the dose, so could well end up dropping a couple of hundred just to stave off the pain. Not to mention the hassle of having to grow that many.

They do say that excessive consumption can actually bring the headaches on, which might perhaps explain why I have been afflicted with them. I am paying the price for that misspent youth, and taking it into misspent middle age.

Class D

Listening to the Today Programme this morning on the bus, and couldn't help but snort loudly at an interview with some prick from the Magistrates' Association who was on to protest at the (further) re-classification of cannabis to a Class B drug. Not so much this, actually, as what he was decrying as the obfuscation of the issue by newly issued Home Office guidance on dealing with cannabis, which now recommends a fixed penalty for possession. His point, for what it's worth, was that this guidance was causing confusion amongst the morons in the chair at the Magistrates Courts and undermining the principles of community justice.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the laws and the wars on drugs (and I think you might be able to guess on which side of the divide I sit) I found it to be incredibly insulting that, when asked, this pillar of the community didn't know which other drugs were also included in the B classification. Neither, as it happens, did Ed Sturton, so the matter was dropped. This is a paraphrase of the segment of the interview as I remember it:

ES: Just to clarify, what other drugs are included in Class B?

MG (Magistrate Guy): You've got me there. I'm not the sort of person to get involved with Class B drugs...

ES: No, neither am I. So, if you don't know, and I don't either, let's not go there.

Now, I wasn't fully aware of the drugs in Class B, but I thought (correctly as it happens) that speed might have been one of them. Here is the current Home Office guidance, which has since this morning been amended to reflect the changes discussed on the Today programme. Speed (unless used to inject) Ritalin and Pholcodine (whatever that is) are included. Magic mushrooms are Class A, while ketamine is Class C! I ask you.

Well, don't even get me started on the later interview about the DEC Gaza appeal with someone from UNRWA and a very shouty James Naughtie...

Oil, guns and drugs

I read the other day, with some interest, that drugs - illicit drugs - are the third most valuable commodity traded on the world markets, after oil and weapons. Slowly but surely, a picture starts to build, a forceful argument which persuades me, of how all three of this unholy trinity are wedded together.

It all started with viewing a website which I have long found fascinating. I have never tried heroin and have no urge to do so, but I am intrigued by it, as I am with many drugs, with our (seemingly ingrained) desire to alter the state we're in. I am drawn to the history and myths of drug-taking, of the speculation about manna and soma, of the British East India Company and the Golden Triangle. Charlie Parker, The Velvet Underground, The Stranglers, the La's and countless others.

There have been people in my life who have been touched by heroin. Some of them have died as a result, and so I know the reality. I know that the glamour is illusory, the euphoria short-lived and the misery endless.

The crux of the matter is in the duplicitousness of governments, perhaps most notably - in the historical sense - the British government, in their attitudes towards these drugs. Prohibition, rehabilitation, tsars, customs seizures... for what? Lies, lies and more lies.

Of course I can remember, though it seems like an eternity ago now, the stated reasons for the invasion of Afghanistan. Osama had gone there, we were told, and it was necessary to destroy Al Qaeda, and liberate the downtrodden women from beneath the oppressive boots of the Taliban warlords. Heady days, when the beatings and cassette smashings were somehow not held up to the light of Saudi standards on human rights as they are now. I'm not saying that I'm the man on the Clapham Omnibus, but it was all so different then. The Twin Towers thing was of course truly mind-blowing, and although I wasn't buying all of the Bushco rhetoric, things didn't slot together for me then as much as they do now. I genuinely thought that the Taliban were a very nasty bunch, though I stopped short of supporting the war.

With regard to the bearded anti-disco-ites, it is I think little short of incredible if one looks at the numbers on opium production. Figures taken from a UN survey of opium poppy production in Afghanistan undertaken in 2004, sum it up. In 2001, when the Taliban were in full control of the country, 200 tonnes of opium were produced. In 2002, after NATO and the Northern Alliance ousted the bearded ones, the figure was up to 3400 tonnes. In 2004, it was as high as 4200 tonnes, not far short of the record high (in 1999) of 4600 tonnes. The crop in 04 was of an inferior quality, says the report, so world prices did not plummet as much as they should have, but drop they did. In 2000, a ton of 'farm gate' opium (that conjures up images of bucolic straw munchers proudly leaning on their bales of drugs while chickens cluck around) would have cost $28. In 2001, the price was $301, and in 2004 it was down again to $92.

So far, so terrifying, I'm sure you'll agree. However, at the risk of being accused of wearing a tin foil hat, I think it is clear that there is even more sinister stuff going on. We're all aware of how Dubya and his cronies are long-time servants of the petroleum industry. But, there are also claims, needless to say strenuously denied by both parties, that Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan, is a former consultant for the Union Oil Company of California. These claims appeared in such dubious sources of information as Le Monde and Reuters.

So there is one aspect of the oil link, the strategic requirement of securing a pipeline for oil (and gas) from Central Asia, in which Afghanistan is vitally important. This black gold feeds the monstrous war machine which is permanently rumbling around the middle east, and all its attendant coteries - Blackwater, Halliburton and the others, and those suckers carry a helluva guns around with them, some of which are certain to get 'lost' at some point.

The next steps are fairly easy to see, if you have eyes. Again, we all know that if you want to buy guns, or opium, or just about any damned thing you care to mention, a good place to go is the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Some tons of dirty money are sloshing around there, you can bet, and, like the great ocean currents, maintain a steady stream of weapons in and drugs out.

There is further reason to believe that control of the global economy in this way is extended to the Balkans. Kosovo, Serbia & Montenegro and Albania are all said to have strong links to the Afghan opium trade, and have of course been to a greater or lesser extent, under the dubious protection of the NATO boys. The deadly dance goes on, and Westminster, Washington, Bonn, Paris and Brussels all continue their doublespeak of the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, the War on War...

God help us all.

politics

music

Beep beep beep beep yeah

Only 13 days remaining till my driving test. I have now entered the 'final phase' of the seemingly interminable driving lessons I have been taking forever and ever and ever. I am too old to be going through this and I wish I had galvanised myself to do it sooner. But I didn't, so there you are.

Today was spent around the avenues and alleyways of Wood Green, turning the car around, reverse parking, reversing around corners and emergency stopping for two hours. Followed by a quick tour under the bonnet (Missus)

I don't particularly like my instructor, who is a singularly homourless man, and not best suited to the rigours of pedagogy, I feel. Shit, he can drive though, so that makes it all right, I guess.

The test itself is a blank book, and it is down to me to write the story. I seek alternative endings (jeez, my hat is raised to that guy - kids, wife, fly agaric, driving...), but know that I am likely to be propelled down the predictable soap slopes, most proly (as I am taking the test at Wood Green) with the 'Christ, didn't I see that coming?' ending.

But one can dream. I have sought advice, have travelled through despair, elation, anger and hope to where I am now, which is a state of reasonable competence and confidence. This will again evolve, without a shadow, to not much less than mild terror as the big day approaches.

It's a funny thing, driving. Even the pathetic little Micra I sit in on my lessons pits the equivalent punch of Tel Aviv's soi-disant nuclear arsenal (compared to, er, Tehran's - for example) against the fastest Allez (with a fully doped Spanish or Italian or French or American rider, making the most of his erythropoietin and banana with energy bar) but I don't get the same rush behind the wheel as I do when I am on two wheels, with the wind whizzing past my ears and the tarmac blur beneath me. And when I look around at the other folks who are negotiating the currents of London traffic, I figure (without wishing to be too derogatory) that it can't be that hard to master the art of driving.

If only there were some other reward at the end of it all...