All around central London, in the ‘better’ parts of the city, many properties that front onto the street have flowers in window boxes or boxes on the railings that bound the property.

They lift the spirits and who knows how far the good vibrations carry?

Add to this that Westminster Council (and maybe other Councils) hangs baskets of flowers at intervals along the main roads, and the Council tend and waters the flower baskets regularly so that the blooms stay for a long season.

I was out buying stuff today and Tamara told me Notting Hill Carnival was on, so I went. Or rather I walked with thousands of others from Paddington. I didn’t get to see the parade, but I saw a lot of people.

On the way there a notice by a police van said that facial recognition software was being used. On the way back I looked in the van and a man was scanning images, and outside a man in handcuffs was shouting out to his friends – ‘I don’t know why’ and ‘It wasn’t my fault’. I wonder how good the software is?

There were a lot of police along the road – several hundred at a guess, and I was thinking what a time consuming waste it is for the most part. I guess, I should say maybe. I should say that maybe without the big police presence all hell would break loose. is that really what Notting Hill Carnival is like – barely suppressed violence? Everybody knows the Carnival is a touchy subject with a big history.

Afterwards, I thought about it and I knew I was caught a bit on the hop and unprepared for the Carnival, so I did a bit of research and here is what I found out – the history at how it influenced how I felt when I was in the crowd walking.

Where to start?

Start with Claudia Jones, born in Trinidad in 1915. As an eight-year-old she moved with her parents to New York. She grew up in Harlem and became a Marxist and a significant Communist Party figure and did so out of the racial prejudice she saw.

In 1955, during the anti-communist repression of the early Cold War she was imprisoned for nine months and then deported under the Alien Registration Act of 1940 for her political activities.

Her offence was to ‘advocate the overthrow of the US government by force or violence, to organise a group advocating such overthrow, or knowingly to belong to such a group.’

She was deported from the US to Britain because Trinidad was then a British colony. Without that fact she would have been deported to a Communist Bloc country as others were.

Now living in London, in 1958 she founded the West Indian Gazette, that reported on discrimination in employment and housing, reported on racist attacks and on international anti-colonial politics.

Then, in what became know as the Notting Hill race riots, white gangs attacked mostly people from the Caribbean over several days beginning on Bank Holiday August 1958.

Jones wanted a public response to assert the community’s identity and celebrate Caribbean culture, to bring people together and to send out a message saying we are here.

The first festival was held indoors in January 1959.

It was held indoors, but the idea couldn’t be contained and the next major organiser was Rhaune Laslett.

She was local, born in London, and a social worker and activist The National Portrait Gallery describes her as the “principal organiser of the Notting Hill Festival, that evolved into the Notting Hill Carnival.”

Claudia Jones meanwhile, died of a heart attack in London on Christmas Eve 1964, and is buried in Highgate Cemetery next to Karl Marx.

In the 1970s relations between the police and young black Londoners were extremely bad. It was the time of the ‘sus law’ that allowed the police to stop and search anyone they thought might be guilty of an offence, and it was almost entirely young black people who were stopped and searched.

Being on a public street and stopped while all around passers-by were looking and judging, was a major factor in the relations with the police.

The ‘sus law’ was was part of section 4 of the Vagrancy Act 1824 that allowed prosecution of a ‘suspected person or reputed thief’ found loitering in certain places with intent to commit an arrestable offence.

After the Brixton riots in 1981, for which the ‘sus law’ was found to be a major contributory factor, the offence was abolished by section 8 of the Criminal Attempts Act 1981.

But in 1976 the law was still in effect and at the 1976 Carnival there was a major confrontation with the police.

That was then, and since then the Carnival has grown to the size it is today, and over the years there have been hundreds of arrests, dozens of stabbings and some fatalities.

Now the numbers are coming through for this year’s Carnival and I was wrong by a big margin for the numbers of police. In fact, 7,000 police were deployed.

So what should I say about how I felt walking along? Pretty much OK. I was one of the oldest faces on the street, and it’s not my home patch. But did I feel ‘simmering violence’? No. it was just people.

This is the prow of the ship from the previous post

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! is a 2012 stop-motion film by Aardman Animations. It follows a hapless Pirate, captain of a ship, intent on winning the Pirate of the Year Award with the help of a young Charles Darwin and a pet parrot that is actually a rare dodo.

I just had to photograph the model at the exhibition at the Young V&A, and clean up the background to make it appear the ship is truly sailing on the seven seas.

The cabin at the stern reminds me of the galleon in the film Sinbad, the Sailor, a 1947 film starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as Sinbad and Sabu as his companion.

The scenes with the galleon bathed in moonlight with light from the candles in the rear cabin setting up the cosiness of the ship are as romantic as it gets.