Notting Hill Carnival - day 2

I'm a local resident - one of the few around in my road this bank holiday.

This morning I start drawing members of the Elimu Mas Band getting ready in the Paddington Arts building, but I begin to shiver on a hot day, leave early and make my way home.

The hundred-plus Batala drummers, sounding like the apocalypse, open proceedings and I pause to watch their complicated cornering manoeuvre into Westbourne Grove.

I revive at dusk and wander out. Concerned citizen journalists are videoing something through gaps in a hedge: police are subduing someone in a garden. But that means riot police and - oh joy - horses.

People are entranced. Pat-the-horse becomes the only game in town. 'I could stay here for ever,' says one boy as his girlfriend pulls him away.

One drunk boy offers to punch a horse. 'I really wouldn't do that,' says the rider.

'What a shitty carnival,' says a drunk white girl wearing hardly any clothes. In one sense she is accurate: as I walk past the villas tonight, the faecal smells are horse, fox and human; the neighbourhood dogs will have a diverting walk tomorrow morning.

 

Notting Hill Carnival 2017: day one

A country which is capable of organising a minute's silence (pretty much) in the Notting Hill Carnival is making a total lash-up of Brexit. You're free to draw your own conclusions.

In the morning I draw people in Elimu Mas Band getting ready in the Paddington Arts building. All is calm and order.

Later in the day I wander out to see what's afoot.

Two views of Babylon:

I start to draw a girl who is rag-doll limp and shouting hoarse abuse at the world but I discover some finer feelings and tell her boyfriend that there's a first-aid centre nearby. It's early evening and her body is dyed which means she's been around since the morning's powder-paint-flinging ceremony. Her boyfriend opts to half-carry his cantankerous burden to the Tube instead. There is a lot of poison in her system which may find an outlet on the Central Line.

In the small area which I patrol, numbers of visitors are down this year but there are many more police. The hippy-ish-looking guy I saw being busted for the contents of his Old Holborn tin probably didn't expect a dozen riot police to find him an object of fascination.

In the streets I look for signs of green for Grenfell: