by Henry VIII attends Notting Hill Carnival and discovers a celebration louder and more joyful than any coronation he ever held
I once quashed uprisings within a week of hearing of them. Notting Hill Carnival lasted two full days and I did not want a single hour of it to end.
The Approach
I heard the carnival roughly a mile before I saw it, a wall of sound built from steel pans, sound systems, and a bass line I felt in my chest before my ears had properly located its source, an experience considerably more overwhelming than any cannon I ever personally commanded, and considerably more welcome.
The Costumes
The costumes alone humbled me. I once believed my own coronation robes represented the height of what a single garment could achieve, and I stood corrected within minutes, watching feathered headdresses the height of a doorway pass by on dancers who moved as though the weight meant nothing at all. I have commissioned entire tapestries with less craftsmanship than one costume I saw pass on Ladbroke Grove.
The Food
I ate jerk chicken from a stall run by a family who have, I was told, held the same pitch for over twenty years, a form of institutional continuity I found more impressive than most royal dynasties, mine included, and certainly more delicious than anything served at any banquet I hosted personally, several of which I am told, in retrospect, were slightly overrated.
The Sound System
I stood for over an hour in front of a single sound system, not dancing at first, simply absorbing it, until a woman beside me, noticing my stillness, took my hand and pulled me gently into the crowd, informing me firmly that standing still at carnival was, in her words, not permitted, a rule I found more binding than most laws I ever personally enacted.
The Walk Home
I walked home well past midnight, ears ringing, feet aching, genuinely moved by something I still cannot fully explain in words, having spent thirty eight years believing that joy on this scale required a throne, an army, or at minimum a war successfully concluded. It required, it turns out, none of those things. It required a street in west London, several hundred thousand strangers, and absolutely no permission from me whatsoever.
The Following Year
I have already told Dev I intend to return next August, and I have started asking Pamela’s WhatsApp group, entirely without irony, for advice on the best viewing spots along the route. I once believed no celebration could rival a coronation for genuine collective joy. I was wrong, and I am, for possibly the first time in either lifetime, glad to have been proven so completely wrong.
Roy later told me the queue itself has its own quiet folklore, regulars who have queued together for decades and barely speak the rest of the year, a kind of friendship I find genuinely moving in its restraint. The steel pans alone deserve a mention alongside Henry VIII, Secretly a Musician. Further reading on the wider chaos of modern Britain: the original account of my own return to this country, a separate London festival’s own creative solution to overcrowding, the pub that finally made me feel properly at home again.
