Carnival Chaos

Over the bank holiday weekend just passed, like so many millions, I flocked to the Notting Hill Carnival. That could, however, be like so many thousands as the number differs from report to report. How the hell can you count a constantly flowing, non-ticketted crowd where there's no one entry point anyway? Do they hire some guy with a statistics degree to look at the crowd and calculate it?: "Uh, yah, so, for X m-squared to be packed there are Y amount of people in it at any one time. With the crowd walking at approximately 0.000001 km/hr over a period of 6 hours there are 656,463 people in attendance." Anyway, that wasn't even the point I was trying to make in this entry, I just don't understand how you can accurately count a crowd and needed to rant.

So, the point is... out of those thousands (or maybe millions, who knows?) much has been made of the fact in the BBC that there was a "hardcore" of trouble makers but that the "interventionist policing" that prevented the "criminals from taking over the streets of Notting Hill". So that's why a 17-yr old and 14-yr old were shot and a "small number of people suffered stab wounds." Nothing to worry about then! The gang of 20 menacing-looking youths that walked past us when we were dancing happily on the street couldn't possibly have been stopped and searched by the non-existent police presence before something awful like a shooting happened.

I really am, for all my sins, a casual follower of the news and politics and I am in no way claiming to make qualified socio-political comments. However, reading this morning about the sudden prison worker strike across England and Wales makes me wonder about security services in the UK in general and how they need a complete revamp to deal with the "criminals" of today. One of the (rather eloquent) prison guards aptly said that jail is no longer a deterrent for criminals but an occupational hazard (there are no restrictions on TV or meals etc.) and that some kids today don't know the distinction between right and wrong. And this all comes back to modern-day parenting, another pet peeve of mine. My mum smacked me alternatively with a bamboo cane and a balloon stick when I was naughty and look at me now: a shining beacon of social perfection (almost). Nowt wrong with a bit of discipline to teach a kid the basic difference between right and wrong. At least I'm not firing random shots out into a crowd of strangers dressed in sequinned spandex for no apparent reason other than that I'm a troubled youth.