THE CARNIVAL IS OVER

AFTER THE personal fiasco of last year’s Notting Hill Cah-nee-vahl, I thought it wiser to give it a miss this time round, and now I’m regretting it. Not only has my answerphone been littered with slurred and giggling messages from people saying “The carnival’s just, wow, I mean, yes” and suchlike, there is also the threat of this being the last proper carnival.

Talk abounds of moving the capital’s one, great, multinational, multi-ethnic event to Hyde Park, thereby relegating it to the status of fest-ee-vahl. Not de same ting at allll. Hippies take note: more people attend Carnival than attended Woodstock or Glastonbury. There is hope after all.

Conspiracy theorists please take note: the carnival provides the opportunity for the malignant Men In Black to stir up race hatred and induce riots and warfare, but it just doesn’t happen. Apart from incompetently rat-arsed whiteys and the occasional black man with bloodshot crystal eyes offering you crack, Carnival is about as peaceful and integrated as it’s possible for our racially diverse culture to get.

And did the BNP turn up in force to give the immigrant vermin a good kicking? Not on your nelly. They stayed at home with mum, practising getting the washing powder into the washing machine without getting it all over the floor, like in the telly advert.

Not that long ago, in the halcyon days before Political Correctness, the occasional member of a black rights group – probably a while middle-class person with a guilt complex – would write irate letters to newspapers complaining about BLACK rubbish bags and phrases such as ‘a BLACK day’ and ‘a BLACK mark on his personality,” much as some young ladies, doubtless suffering from the vagaries of their hormones, have been known to voice disapproval of the term ‘manhole’.

Well, either the message that we subliminally put other cultures down through our speech patterns somehow sunk into my brain or their is an increasing trend for advertisements to imply that their products are somehow racially superior.

It started with the above-mentioned washing powder ad. You know the one. Mum goes out leaving skinhead thug son to wash his own shirt. The intended message may well have been that even braindead scum can manage to wash their own clothes with the recommended product, but the message I was picking up was entirely different. It read: “This powder washes whiter than white, removing nasty black and brown things and thereby contributing to a whiter, brighter race.”

It got worse with the new Hovis ad, which appears to be offering racially pure white bread, wholly untainted by brownness. On second thoughts, it could just be the way my mind is, er, working at the moment.

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Carnaby Street has been attempting to revive the halcyon days of the sixties when the central London shopping boulevard was still actually a hip and happening place to swap your bread for some threads, rather than a rather sad flea market flogging cheap, imported hippy, Goth and rocker clothes.

It attempted to achieve the impossible dream with street performers and go-go dancers in the shop windows. Now, while dancing ladies was probably a touch outrageous when the spirit of the sixties wafted over the street in a haze of patchouli and loud floral prints, it surely takes something just a mite stronger to create the same impact on the jaded, cynical youth of today.

Had the local shopkeepers’ association chosen me as their publicity agent I could have offered them a real event to remember: the spirit of the nineties.

Never mind jaded old tarts in false eyelashes and white PVC miniskirts wobbling their arses around with plastic smiles on their face. What they want is live body-piercing – perhaps of unsuspecting passers-by – or a delegation from the SM Gays group doing the Birdie Dance, for example. Or a poignant selection of dead and diseased homeless people. Now that’s what I call entertainment.

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You obviously know all about lateral thought or you wouldn’t be a devoted reader of my column. You may not know, off the side of your head, who invented it. Well, it was, of course, Edward de Bono (no relation, but probably capable of being equally smug) and his latest book is all about how to do parallel thought.

The idea is that instead of compartmentalising people and events into good and bad, we have parallel streams of information about them running through our mind, retrieving whichever date is relevant to the situation. Well, apparently, de Bono was recently discussing this in a restaurant with Peter Gabriel and Ron Jones, whom, if my memory serves me well (which it does from time to time) wrote the theme music for Star Wars.

As the inventor of both perpendicular and strange spirally thought, I would greatly have liked to be the fly in de Bono’s soup, so to speak, unless it was a chilled soup, in which case I would have been sick.

Gabriel doubtless seized on the theory, seeing as it would allow for someone who, for instance, makes great videos but has been known to wear very dodgy outfits and get awesomely pompous, to avoid being tarred forever with the once-a-twannock . . . brush.

Personally, I thought parallel thought was what happened when you’ve had more than a few too many and your brain’s trying to think about several totally unconnected subjects all at the same time and comes up with that particular form of sincere and utter gibberish which is fascinating to no-one except the gibberer.

But then I’m not a scientist, just an explorer of the realms of the senses.