Carne vale, ave jerk chicken!

My brother came down to Bristol for the weekend so that he could join me in St Paul's for the first carnival since I moved here in 2020. It didn't disappoint. Although it got unfeasibly crowded later, wandering the local streets just before things really got going was a lot of fun.

What I like best about the carnival is that, as well as professional food stalls, half the people in the area get out their oil drum smokers and cook ridiculous amounts of jerk chicken, curry goat, rice and peas, dumplings, etc., from their gardens, along with rum, Red Stripe, etc. (Special temporary licences are available for carnival.) It's truly a community thing, even if later on 100,000 people zoom in on the place:



My house happened to be on the procession route, so later on I was able to step outside and see this, literally outside my front door. (See if you can spot Yurika, my current tenant, sitting in seiza on the bin shed.)



I momentarily thought the last picture might be something to do with celebrating the year of my birth - then I remembered the Bristol Bus Boycott...