The second biggest street party in the world, don't you know

To the Notting Hill Carnival on Sunday for my first time, and it sort of encapsulated everything about London. Up from the Central Line at Holland Park station (not Notting Hill Gate; Whitehall, my friend and guide said, that's for Carnival virgins) and meandering through tony, posh Ladbroke Grove, with its whitewashed Victorian townhouses, Chelsea tractors parked imperiously just inside vine covered gated drives. Richard Curtis London.

Then: turning into the Carnival, and the speed changes, a needle scratching along a classical LP and replaced by booming hip hop. Rammed shoulder to shoulder with a mass of multi-coloured, multi-cultural, multi-this-and-that humanity, accompanied by the thump-thump-thump of drum n bass, Afro beats, steel drums, a new sound around each corner and dancing, drinking, dancing, drinking. Zadie Smith London.


Then: sampling dubious looking but delicious but overpriced jerk chicken, several anxious waits in a port-a-loo queue, idly wondering why there are no bins and who the hell is going to clean up this mess, and finally the inevitably delayed, sweaty fug of an overcrowded tube ride home.

Friday bits and bobs

A few things that have caught my eye over the past week or so.

A nice freebie here. A journalist, Max Millard, interviewed the great and the good in New York City during the 1970s whilst working for a variety of newspapers, and he is giving away a free ebook of the interviews here and here. It is fascinating mostly for the wide range of people from Stan Lee to Betty Friedan to George Plimpton to Isaac Asimov.

Sony is launching a new eReader in the UK. I only mention this in order to post a gratuitous photo of the lovely Sadie Jones, who was at the launch at the British Library.



And, my little spot on BBC Radio 4's "You and Yours", yukking it up with Peter White about Potter-less Bloomsbury and the state of the trade.

How the dead live

So a touristy London weekend. On Saturday, propelled by Wolf Hall besotted-ness, I went to Hampton Court. It is an impressive, if schizophrenic palace, half Tudor, half Baroque. I love the Tudor bit most. Built by Cardinal Wolsey who gifted it to Henry VIII in order to forestall the good Cardinal's downfall (that didn't work so well), it's all about solidity, power, cowing and wowing guests, and it is so easy to imagine Henry stamping down the halls. Most of the exhibitions are done well, but there are some rather irksome 'let's engage the kids' sort of touches, like the ghostly whispering "divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, died" piped into one of the stairwells.

The clean lines and Versailles-lite of the later Baroque stuff I don't find as appealing. And something puts me off about the (admittedly impressive) wide expanse of formal gardens. They are two boxed in, regimented, controlled. It's all a-flower but it doesn't seem alive. Still, I did get to see the oldest and biggest grape vine in the world, which is something to tell the grandkids.




On Sunday, to Highgate Cemetary, which curiously felt so much more alive than the Hampton Court gardens. Sure, there is the box office draws of Karl Marx's and George Eliot's grave, but what I loved was the verdant, unchecked undergrowth creeping over tombstones, angel statues poking out through trees, vines above a group of graves with the ripe grapes dropping down so you squish them as you walk, the sweet smell of blackberries in the air, butterflies flitting amongst tombstones. It is not a place of death so much, but to celebrate the dead's lives.







The artist Patrick Caulfield's gravestone is quite frankly a work of genius...



...but this tiny aspirational inscription was my favourite of all.

The question is, will the Vamp be stiffer than Robert Pattison's acting?

I'm not easily shocked, but I did do a little double take today when word reached my ears that a sex toy company called Tantus is producing a Twilight-themed dildo. Allow those words to sink in: Twilight-themed dildo. Isn't that more than a wee bit off, given that the Twilight target audience is, well, children? And even more so since, and this is my reading, that the underlying message of the series is sex is evil, you'll die if you do it, and, hey, why not try Mormonism?

Just to be clear, "The Vamp" isn't official Twilight merchandise, with a picture of a smiling and satisfied Stephenie Meyer giving a thumbs up on the box. But I think you get the message from the copy on the site (my emphases):

"The Vamp is a realistic form dildo based appropriately on our Sire's design but with a deathly pale flesh tone reminiscent of the new moon's glow. Don't be surprised if this toy seduces you, its long sleek shaft and deliciously ridged head calling to you in the twilight. But don't save this for just nocturnal escapades, try taking our Vamp out in the sunlight and watch him sparkle.

The Vamp is a web only exclusive offering through TantusInc.com for $39.99. We are currently taking pre-orders for this one of a kind toy. We will be shipping them first come first serve starting 9/1/09. Don't let this eclipse pass into the breaking dawn, place your order today."

"Don't let this eclipse pass into the breaking dawn"? If you didn't know your Twilight and you were just perusing the Tantus for a new lady's friend, would that make any sort of sense?

True lies

One of the more cherished lies the English tell themselves is that they are good sports, they never cheat, 'just not cricket' and all that. This particularly manifests itself in football, a sport which has its fair share of gamesmanship and cheating - Maradona's Hand of God which beat the English in the 1986 World Cup maybe the most famous example.

The subtext in the way the media here treats cheating in sports is that it is those swarthy foreigners — greasy South Americans and garlic eating Continentals in particular — who will do anything to gain an advantage. Not our brave boys: we're honest and true. Which is, of course, self-delusional bullshit as anyone who has watched the English national team in recent years, particularly the stamping, poking and gouging thug John Terry and Wayne 'goes down quicker than George Michael' Rooney.

This past few days we've had a couple of examples of true English sportsmanship. In a game featuring Crystal Palace and Bristol City, a clear goal by Palace was not allowed because the referee and his three assistants were the only ones in the stadium who failed to see it. Palace lost 1-0, which sent boss Neil Warnock, who tends to bleat like a fishwife even when things are going well, into near apoplexy. He rightly called the Bristol City players and coach 'cheats' for not saying something to the referee.



Then on to rugby, which has seen Dean Richards the coach of Harlequins (which apparently is a Rugby Union team - as opposed to Rugby League, I am unsure of the difference, it's all just beefy men in short-shorts to me) banned for three years for making his players fake injuries to get fresh players on the field. These were 'blood injuries', so the players had concealed blood capsules in their socks, as if canon fodder extras in a Hollywood shoot 'em-up, to pop into their mouths at the opportune moment. But the brilliant thing is that Richards' mea culpa was anything but, sure he held his hands up but, it was farcical because "it didn't pan out particularly well on the day." So, it's not really cheating if it doesn't work, then?

What people were reading today on the upper deck of the 242 from Shoreditch to Holborn

Lanky guy, mid-20s, hair cut close to disguise his receding hairline. Sat cross-legged taking up two seats, sighed loudly when someone had the temerity to ask if they could sit next to him: A Fraction of the Whole, Steve Tolz (Penguin).





Squat Asian woman, salt and pepper bun pulled back tight, mouthing words silently as she read: A battered, heavily annotated pocket sized leather editor of The Bible, I think NIV, couldn't see the publisher.





A well-fed City type, man in his early 50s, blue suite, powder blue shirt, self-satisfied rather punchable face: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson (Quercus).






Raven haired petite woman, olive skin, coal-dark eyes, next to me, her perfume something like lilacs and fresh cut grass: La chica que soñaba con una cerilla y un bidón de gasolina, Stieg Larsson. Incidentally, this is the second time in about two months I have seen someone reading this in Spanish. It's the second book, The Girl who Played with Fire in English and this translates to 'the girl who dreamed about a match and a can of gasoline.' Maybe it rolls off the tongue in Spanish.




Me: The Good Soldier Svejk, Jaroslav Hasek (Penguin Classics).







Everybody else: The freakin' Metro.

Revealed at last

"It is, in fact, Thomas Pynchon."

So that's the admission from a Penguin US publicist about the narrator for the YouTube trailer to his new stoner detective novel Inherent Vice, after some fine detective work by the WSJ's Speakeasy. Pynchon is all over the shop these days, putting together a music playlist for the book on Amazon.