Carnival Captured exhibition

The Carnival Village Trust have just held a multi-media art competition to mark 50 years of the Notting Hill Carnival. 

There is a free exhibition of selected entries at the Tabernacle, 34-35 Powis Square, W11 2AY, until 5 March 2017, 10am-9pm.

I won second prize in the 18+ category with these five drawings. Elimu Carnival Band and Paddington Arts kindly allow me to draw people getting ready in the morning. It's indoors, and quiet, with a proper chair. 

This photograph, taken in 1994 by Chandra Prasad, is the competition winner. It looks at skin but is the only image in the show which gets under the skin of the carnival. No one is smiling. Hard to date (and hard to photograph in the gallery lighting), it's in one of those parts of Notting Hill haunted by Peter Rachman.

And do you know who this woman is? She was dancing at last year's carnival. It would be nice to find her before the exhibition ends. This photo, by Denise Turley, shared third prize.

Thanks are due to the competition benefactors - Arts Council England, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the Tabernacle and the Westway Trust.

Job application

Dear Ms Hawkins,

We are writing to apply for the post of President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom on a job-sharing basis.

We note that high judicial office is a requirement for the post [it isn't - ed]. We sit at a height of five feet on our retail display point, which gives us an advantage over other applicants. Our bench, being made of glass, offers complete transparency.

We have observed with pleasure the Court’s thoughtful gesture in placing the TV monitors so that, while fulfilling our duties in the cafeteria, we can hear the oral submissions.

We exist in multiples, so we can be in more than one place at a time – something denied to the present incumbent although we believe he would find it extremely useful.

While we have travelled in the briefcases of many senior legal entities and shared their boudoirs, we are noted for our discretion, even though our eyes really do follow you round the room.

Our contribution to debate would be modest; our judgments would be noted for brevity, or even for total absence; and we would find the interview stage of this application rather challenging; but the role which we are proud to uphold in society would make it impossible for us to be defined as ‘enemies of the people’.

As some of our friends in the USA may need to be reminded, we represent a voice, albeit a very quiet one, for unity: E PLURIBUS URSUS.

Yours respectfully,

The bears of the Supreme Court and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council

PS We regret that our application was unsuccessful, so we have been busy with our helpful book, The Supreme Court: A Guide for Bears.

Supreme Court: council policy out of the window

Blind cord, Court 2

First up, phobias. Poshteh v Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea is about post traumatic stress disorder, not phobia, but I’m going to link them as they both enrage people who apply terms such as ‘reasonable’, ‘objectivity’ and ‘pull yourself together’.

My first memory is of being scared witless by some geezer with a fake white beard and red hood. Later, as a student, I was being paid to chop vegetables in a private house on Christmas day. The grandfather crept up behind me in costume and said, ‘Don’t peek, it’s Santa Claus.’ I spun round in terror and to this day I marvel that I didn't stab him as a reflex.

This case also involves an asylum-seeker. The Royal Borough once asked me to draw at an event for looked-after children, some of whom had been asylum-seekers or refugees. Some were from Eritrea. Some had arrived in this country alone. They were a great bunch, and they will always be ambassadors. 

So, as a nation, let’s not turn our back on more kids like these, eh? While we allow rich people from overseas to buy properties and leave them empty?

Empty or full, the housing stock in Kensington and Chelsea is varied. Slapdash Victorian speculators, Peter Rachman and the Luftwaffe have all left their mark. 




Nowadays, casual violations of planning and conservation rules pop up like weeds. Together with legally permitted vanity projects. And don’t get me started on the basements. If there isn't enough room for you and your cigar storage around here, go to Bracknell.

Today’s case concerns Vida Poshteh who was tortured and imprisoned in Iran. She applied for asylum in the UK; she and her child were housed temporarily by RBKC. 

She was offered permanent accommodation in a housing association flat with a round living-room window but on viewing it she had a panic attack and turned the flat down. She suffers from PTSD and her prison cell had a round window. No one is suggesting that she is lying. The council says she should just live there anyway.

The bench proffers suggestions – that she should maybe put a curtain over the round window or never go into the living room. 

This is kindly meant, but to a PTSD-sufferer it is likely to have overtones of the bloody chamber.

For a couple of seconds we see a photo of the living room

The council says that the window is three feet in diameter, set in a wall five feet three inches wide. There is a rectangular window in the same room. It sounds like some unpardonable jeu d’esprit on the part of an architecture student.

Ms Poshteh’s undoing in the Court of Appeal seems to have been that she had initially agreed to live in that flat on a temporary basis. The council wished to construe this as permanent. But sometimes you might just say things to get authority figures off your back. Ms Poshteh has been served with an eviction notice. Happy Christmas.

Window fastenings in Court 2 look like handcuffs

Satanic yoga

Yoga in Black, described unofficially if not on the website as satanic, recoils from modish body fascism. It is uncompetitive in kind lighting with a soundtrack - not too loud - described as dark ambient, doom metal, drone and Gothic rock.

The theme is acceptance. For those who know their chakras it's a variation of Dru yoga. There's plenty of movement and it looks achievable, unlike the contortionist stuff of the fanatics.

I barely notice the soft-sell paganism. My satanic experience doesn't happen until afterwards: a flat tyre in the cold, dark and rain. I wait for the AA. It's new year's day. Hours pass.

Just as I am thoughtfully examining the gel-filled pee bags kept in the glove box, someone emerges from the nearest house with several bags of  rubbish and recycling. 

I ask to use the lavatory. And when the repair man turns up, I take up the sainted Lucia's offer of refuge with her family for the hour it takes him to fix the tyre. Her bossy Dachsund called Colin teaches me a ball game. This is the closest I get to a family Christmas.

More pictures if you scroll down.

Supreme Court: contract and carols

There was much chortling in-jokery last week about Lord Sumption’s ties at the four-day Article 50 hearing. Today, Jeeves has clearly returned from his holiday but there are no fervid rune-readers here to report that Lord Sumption is wearing an EU-blue tie with what could from a distance be gold stars on it. They are probably polka dots.

Today’s case is about contract and trusts. It refers to planning permission. Meanwhile the court has a planning application notice outside, as it is seeking to replace an oak floor which has a romantic creak like a ship in full sail. I hope the sound gets archived before the timbers are shivered.

BPE Solicitors and another v Hughes-Holland (in substitution for Gabriel) is the latest in a strand of litigation stemming from a discussion in ‘the Red Hart public house’ in 2007 between two friends: Richard Gabriel is the godfather of one of Peter Little’s children. Mr Gabriel agreed to lend Mr Little’s company £200,000 towards developing a property at Kemble Airfield (Cotswold Airport), formerly the base of the Red Arrows.

I google Cotswold Airport. In its AV8 restaurant ‘you will be able to watch the world fly by in a classy atmosphere with a distinctly Mediterranean feel, something that you do not come across very often in the UK.' I guess that's why I voted Remain.

The property was not developed, the loan was not repaid. Mr Gabriel chose, as counsel puts it today, 'to roll the dice of litigation’. Can he recover from his solicitors the money he lost, and did they have a duty to protect him from the loss? Are Dickens and Kafka playing consequences?

At lunchtime, the Treasury Singers arrive for their annual charity carol concert, this year for Crisis. 

We are ushered into the lofty anarcho-gothic-pre-Raphaelite library (normally off-limits), which has been camped up with pine garlands and poinsettias. Justices pop in. The Supreme Court’s misdescribed Can’t Sing Choir join in with relish and don Santa hats for the finale, We Wish You a Merry Christmas. There is an earnest endeavour that touches the flinty heart. 

I go to the café where my friend does some quick and easy Christmas shopping, including a teddy bear for a baby. 

Supreme Court: last day of Article 50 hearing

I start in one of the overspill courts, watching on a screen. 

Helen Mountfield QC (below), for the crowd-funded People's Challenge group, starts with an unnecessary apology: ‘To some the legal arguments in the case may sound dry and antiquarian…’

No, for a non-lawyer this is the good stuff: we get the Treaty of Utrecht, the Seven Years’ War, Henry IV, Henry VIII (whose face is carved into an oak bench in the courtroom), William III and George III.

She adds: ‘Mr Eadie’s submissions are the equivalent of arguing that because none of the attempts to catch the Loch Ness monster succeeded, the Loch Ness monster still roams free.’

As a sacrifice to nerves, Mr Eadie starts with something baffling which depends on knowing the form of a certain race-horse. 

Manjit Gill QC speaks movingly on behalf of vulnerable people, including British children and disabled people whose parents, guardians or carers, aka bargaining chips, may lose their right to live in the UK.

At lunchtime a punter hands out Cadbury Heroes. Witnessing this superb exposition of legal process is poor consolation for the national shame of Brexit and its spiteful aftermath.

In the afternoon I inherit a space in the courtroom. Terrible sightlines.

Time for the last submission before Mr Eadie returns for the government. Lord Neuberger: 'Final shake of the kaleidoscope of the front bench. Mr Green.'

If I am to abandon remoaning, where can I redirect my attention? Il faut cultiver notre jardin. A no-borders cat has just left contemptuous paw prints in our wet cement. Fuchsia bug mite ignores trade barriers and plant health checks: it reached England from the US about ten years ago. My plants are riddled with it. You can’t disengage from the single organism we belong to.

This is the second piece of EU referendum-related litigation to reach the Supreme Court, and presumably not the last as this fiasco plays out over decades of decline. In May, the court upheld a ruling that British expats who'd lived outside the UK for more than 15 years could not vote in the referendum. The Conservatives didn’t get round to changing that in time.

Lord Neuberger - two of many seat positions