Cultural phenomena (or what I hate more than I hate Christmas)

Do you know much about British Carnival Season? I certainly don't¹. But I know enough to let rip, so here goes.

I hate 'carnival' week almost as much as I hate Christmas, and I hate Christmas A LOT. You haven't experienced me on Christmas yet. You've got me on novel writing before then so be patient.

In the mean time there's carnival week. This lame town has tried several other things in a half arsed way in a pathetic attempt to inject some life. Sensible Brits have always responded by staying away in droves. The town is on a downward spiral to dormitory town status - housing, a supermarket, some pubs plus an adequate sufficiency of hairdressers and life's absolute essential - the tanning salon.

The Beer Festival is a dirty little secret that is over before a beer drinker like me knows its happening and music week was cancelled this year for lack of support.

That leaves fucking carnival; a series of random events that don't add up to a coherent celebration of anything². Our main playing field is taken over by a bunch of in-bred peasants trailing cheap and nasty 'rides' and side-show alley rip-off ventures. For several nights running our town becomes something bearing a passing resemblence to a war zone and almost a no-go area; we're over-run by foul mouthed youths, drunk, stoned and dragging half dressed banshee-like females about. More brawling, verbal and physical violence, vandalism, petty theft, underage drinking and drug taking happens in the space of this week than happens in the rest of the year.

For some reason people feel compelled to drag their young children out into the chilly late-September nights to witness this tawdry spectacle; perhaps they're just squaring up to the reality of what prospects this country's lamentable education system, tax and welfare arrangements and economic infrastructure leave these children.

Look son, one day all this will be yours.

I hate carnival.

A baby show is staged and the prize almost inevitably falls to the fat ugly grandchild of someone who if caught would be found to have their hands clutching a few strings. Something similar used to go for the trainee slut declared Carnival Queen, who for her trouble gets to travel up the high street wreathed in something like an early draft of Lady Diana Spencer's wedding dress while having money flung at her. Again, possibly valuable training for the life that awaits her. She's usually attended by a couple of girls who form her court - often chewing gum, sometimes asleep and once brazenly picking her nose as the procession passed us.

These days it is more a matter of 'you want to be it? The job's yours!' such is the level of interest among girls who know that, should they be chosen, it will be the case that while they spend the evening looking like a dickhead their mates are all off getting drunk and picking up one or other STD in the shadows beind the Twister or what ever ride provides the most ample cover.

For the duration the town is over-run with pallid, scrawny examples of the very worst sort of intellectually and physically undernourished underclass who can't put a sentence together without using the word FUCK at least once and habitually address people they dislike as CUNT. Clever, eh? They come in on the trains and then at the end of the week, thankfully, they go back to beneath whatever rock it was they crawled out from under.

The culmination of the week's 'festivities' is a 'torch lit' procession. This is lots of stupid but enthusiastic locals dressed up not quite as well as they'd like to think, yomping up the High Street rattling collection tins at those inhabitants not stupid enough to participate directly, but too stupid to get right out of the way of the whole sorry business.

The floats are interspersed with 'bands' (brass and pipe favoured, but not actually together thankfully) and 'marching bands' of fat girls in lots of lycra and porn-reject boots.

The procession, which is actually lit by a combination of bog-standard street lighting and a plethora of those nasty little multi-coloured glowing wands so beloved by children of all ages, ends with a fireworks display that annually terrorises cats, dogs and - as it takes place on land adjacent to the wild life reserve - lots of protected species .

Then, happily, the whole sorry business is all over.

The following day the in-bred mob on the playing fields pack up and leave, mercifully early, and within a couple of days the place is once again not too unpleasant a place to live. Roll on tomorrow then.

1. The origins typically lie in the late Victorian or Edwardian era when carnivals were staged periodically as a way of raising much needed funds for local hospitals and charities. The widespread phenomenon of the annual street carnival and procession rigamarole is much more recent, dating typically to the post-war years.

2. In theory the organising committee agrees a Theme and a set of worthy causes to benefit from a proportion of the monies raised, supposedly after Consultation and . In practice anything goes (except the whole damned idea) and I haven't the faintest idea what happened to the money.