Londonmeup.com has sat atop your favourites list for over a year now. In fact, exactly one year ago today, I was chilling out, maxing and relaxing all cool... I was celebrating (leisurely with a can of Panda Pop and a Freddo – setting a good example for the kids) having just released issue 14 of this very webzine. I remember the issue because the event was the Notting Hill Carnival (2009’s attempt at making it the biggest, longest, drunkest, most tiring, and most violent carnival since the word ‘carnival’ was invented by the Disney corporation in 1959. And boy did they achieve that! 741 injuries, 222 arrests, 1 stabbing). I spoke (in the write up) about it being my first experience of carnivalities, and about it being my 3-year anniversary of London life.

It’s taken until this very second, writing this, to realise that last Sunday was my 4th anniversary of me moving to London. I guess when it gets to a certain number you just gradually stop thinking about it. Like trying to remember the date of your wedding anytime after finishing off the cake (23½ years later). My 2009 write up finished with me revealing I wasn’t really certain how good a time I had. So it comes with some relief that I wanted to attend this year. I must have enjoyed it enough to want to go back, but the same uncertainty still filled me like a Blue Peter Charity Campaign’s cardboard visual aid.

It’s a carnival of loud music, of street food, and of brightly coloured costume. Of course, this is what everyone knows. An Inuit on his hols, topping up his tan in Tenerife could tell you that. What’s it really about? It’s about pissing up a storm in a stranger’s house for the hefty price of one pound, it’s about hanging off a traffic light to get ‘that perfect shot’, it’s about secretly and subconsciously searching the 1million strong crowd for that girl from work you’re worried you might be getting a little obsessed with, it’s about queuing for 3 years to buy some burnt, Jerk chicken and jollof rice, then leaving it in a heaping mess on the tarmac when you remember you don’t like plantain, it’s about using the policemen as signposts.

For me, it’s about all of these things, but most of all it’s about what it’s not about. It’s not about music – I don’t like the music, being screamed from the top of the stacked speaker’s black plastic (are they made of plastic) lungs, standing like cans of food awaiting nuclear war. It’s not about dancing... I love to dance (and sing), just ask anyone fortunate enough to share a tube carriage with me, but I can’t dance to music I don’t like. And it’s not about everyone having a good time with a smile on their face – most of the costumed dancers are so miserable they look like Baron Bomburst (Ruler of Vulgaria)’s dancing Birthday presents.

I don’t enjoy it for the same reasons, then, that everyone talks about. But I do enjoy it for others. I like it for the photography. For the colour, the costumes, the (occasional) smile on a child’s face, the crowds, the unruly mis-order. It’s a great thing to try and capture in a photograph. In truth, apart from showing up... getting in... taking some pics until you get tired or bored, then getting out again with enough energy to make it home... what else is there? For me... nothing. But isn’t that enough? I’m sure it’s great if you’re the type of person who really – honestly – wants to dance in the street with a bottle of Malibu, dancing to... anything, getting drunker and drunker with stranger and stranger people, then by all means. Fill your boots! Don’t, on any account, let my miserable nature stop you.

But to enjoy the carnival from my point of view, the photography... here are the pictures.