Urinating at Notting Hill Carnival

Here’s a story of one of the most eventful urinations of my whole life, which happened at Notting Hill carnival, a couple of months ago. I'd drunk a fair bit and was needing to find somewhere to relieve myself. Being a male, anywhere would have done; an alleyway, a bush in the park, an assortment of plastic cups. But none could be found.

The side streets had been boarded off by the police to keep the party all down the one main street, so I had to use the designated toilet areas. This meant a very long queue.

Now when my brain tells me "hey, you're gonna have to urinate soon." I've basically got about a 30 minute period until it's all over. So I queue up to this toilet that is down some stairs and into a building; there's just the one toilet and the queue is moving ever so slowly.

There are some speakers in the window playing some raggadub and the vibrating bass isn't helping my bladder one bit. I reach the bottom if the stairs and am now just 5 people away from my destination, when out of nowhere comes a group of 5 girls, who push in the queue and stop behind me.

The girl who had previously been behind me quite rightly and politely said "Excuse me are you in the queue?" by which she meant “what the devil are you doing?”
The leader of the girls said "yeah we are in da queue, we're gonna use the toilet, you thick or sumfin?"
"No, I'm not thick, but you should go to the back of the queue instead of pushing in."

At this point, out of the blue, the 5 girls just attack the girl behind me, grabbing her hair and slapping her. So me and this other chap try and break it up. But I'm not gonna lie, I was clearly the weakest person in this situation. During the scrapping a window got broken and the group of girls ran up the stairs and away. They left this poor girl behind with her bag upside down on the floor, some hair ripped out her head, and she had a broken nail. And not just any old nail it was a proper nice one that she'd clearly spent ages painting.

As I helped her with her stuff and gave her my one and only bacon shaped plaster for her bleeding finger, she seemed surprisingly calm about the whole thing. Until the woman who owned the building came storming out and told the girl that she had to leave because she had broken the window. The girl and I tried to explain that it was this group of girls who had since left but the woman wasn't having any of it and she demanded that the girl gave her some money to pay for the damaged window and then leave.

At this point other people began to back us up and the woman begrudgingly went back inside and let her stay in the queue.

This experience made me a sad man. Like, it's meant to be a carnival celebrating everything good about the Caribbean culture, and you can't even go for a wee without a group of kids attacking you. Disgrace to their race.

Poor girl didn't even seem angry or anything, she just seemed embarrassed.
How angry must those girls have been to just attack someone for no other reason than that she didn't want them to push in front of her?
I blame the parents.

Happy ending though - I got to use the toilet for free. They were charging a pound each but the whole commotion had left the people in charge distracted.

A Warm Welcome to UmBongoDreams

A new contributor to Sobweb Productions is born today... Welcome, UmBongoDreams! We have a (new) tradition of asking a couple of questions to our contributors when they join. Let's see what UmBongoDreams has to say:

What do you want to do before you die?
Not that I'm criticising your interview style but I've always preferred the question 'what do you want to do while you're still alive' rather than '..before you die'; it just has a better ring to it I think.

But I suppose all the normal answers such as travel the world, have a family, skydive ... but I guess in terms of what I hope to achieve in my life, I've always had an image of moving to North America and setting up a bar. Dream Big I know. I don't know what it is but I could never see myself in a '9 to 5' style career and I think owning my own bar would give me my much needed daily amount of social interaction as well as a reason to get up in the mornings and a not too stressful working life. I'm sure that owning a bar is a lot harder than it looks on It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia with not as much free time in the day to go on acid trips in morph suits as them but I can do basic accounts and I have a fondness for cleaning.

I've always found the city of New Orleans alluring. I saw a documentary once where Morgan Freeman talked about the birth of Blues and Jazz and ever since I've wanted to visit.

Canada has also had my attentions for a while, specifically British Columbia which as a province has an amazing blend of animated city night life and breath-taking mountain range scenery.

I can really see myself living somewhere like this and plan to do a trial run in my gap year, whenever that may be.

I don't have any definite plans in mind for my life, but when people ask that is my default answer. Travelling is the main item on my agenda though. The way I see it, we don't get to choose which country we are born into, I got lucky with the UK. And now I have the opportunity, should I wish to take it, to see as much of the world as I can; and I intend to.

Favourite quote?
Quotes are a strange thing for me. I see people use them on a day to day basis where they lazily use other people's words to express their own feelings. I think the more people use quotes rather than trying to re-word them into their own style, the more these quotes will become diluted and vague in their meaning. However I am one of these people who uses quotes a lot and one that I always find myself returning to is from Jim Morrison, a sort of hero of mine in many ways, who said;

"It's a funny thing, I noticed that when people are joking they're usually dead serious, and when they're dead serious it's usually pretty funny."

Thanks for the insight UmBongoDreams.

And now, for your enjoyment, here's a sneaky sample of the sort of thing he'll be posting.

I ordered some DIY Night Vision Goggles from eBay ...

... I'm a little disappointed to be honest.