How the week flies when you’re, I dunno, traipsing down to the market, reading on the sofa with the windows open, grilling broccolini to go with baked salmon fillets, popping into little chocolate shops for little chocolates! I met my ex-colleagues for a drink at the Tap a couple of days ago, and they said, “What are you doing these days?” “Nothin’,” I said, and we savoured the word. “I would make a great house husband,” Christos said. “Your wife would get home,” I said, “and you’d be sitting on the sofa in your bathrobe watching the soaps.” I took an invisible cigarette from my lips and blew an invisible smoke ring. “As long as you’re sexy,” Christos said, and he is Greek and spends his holidays on Athenian beaches, “the housework doesn’t matter.”

This past Monday morning we woke up at ten, maybe later, me and Olive, we rolled over and stretched and the sun was out and housework was not on the agenda. What is better than a bank holiday is a bank holiday that creeps up on you. Two years in this country and I still can’t keep them straight. It just means, though, that when a bank holiday swings round, it’s like it’s being handed to me on a shiny pedestal platter, and in a swirl of rainbow confetti and rose petals.

We thought we’d check out the Notting Hill Carnival, because why not. “Biggest street fair in Europe,” the stories went. “Steel bands,” they said, “costumes, parades, floats.” “OK!” I said, because I am easily sold, “although I have a feeling we will get there and it will be crowded and noisy and we will want to leave.” “In which case,” I said, because I like an exit plan, “I suppose we will leave.”



At the Westbourne Park Tube station, the hordes. “Ah,” we said, and it became clear to us that we’d thought we known, but we had no idea. The hordes along the train platform, and the hordes up the stairs. The hordes pouring out onto the street. “Left or right?” Olive said, and I looked at the hordes, first, then the hordes. We went left, maybe, or right, I don’t know now, and it’s quite possible we went left first then right, there was music everywhere and the beats thumped in my chest. Great black speakers balanced one on another on every other street corner, it seemed, and the beats thumped and bumped in my chest. Down one end, the air was smoky and delicious with meat on the grill. Jerk chicken, the signs read, and grilled corn and rice and beans, and there the breeze carried suggestions of curries and palm trees and sun-smelling skin at the end of the day.

Where the reggae played, the girls and boys in dreads and loose cotton trousers swayed and nodded. On another street, men dressed like Elvis on a Hawaiian holiday danced to Frankie Valli and the Ronettes. The parade came down Westbourne Grove and the girls waved their bandannas and the drummers the drummers the drummers.



We got chocolate ice creams for the walk through the park afterwards, after we’d strolled some and jiggled our heads some and admired the police horses some and looked at the Ralph Lauren crowd screaming along to Guns N’ Roses.

I don’t know how it’s September already when, with the sun out now, it feels like summer’s just finding its groove.