So what exactly did I do for the first day of the Carnival? Shake it up perhaps? Conga behind a float? Get drunk on Red Stripe? Hug someone I'd never seen before ? No, did none of them. Something just as well recognised, I followed a similar migratory path that a lot of other long-term residents take: I went somewhere else. Got out of the noise zone.

My first years in Notting Hill, I loved the Carnival, always spent a day wandering around, absorbing noise, sound, smells, aroma, the headiness that a million people can infect an area with, but eventually, incredibly, I got old, and heat, dust, dull thudding music are too much for me, and that's before adding in the vast numbers of people. So these days I opt out and go somewhere else. Let me say this though: it's only age that's diminished my wish to participate, I'm still a believer in it.