BLOG 257 - FREEDOM!!!!

“Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.” Albert Camus  Nobel Prize winning author

Inversion rituals are in every society. They are the pressure cooker vent that every societies need for a chance for all good citizens to be BAD… just for a day.

Here in the UK we have a few favourites, April Fool’s Day, Pride, Halloween… you know the drill days where normal rules do not apply. You know the sort of things…where trusted newscasters can publicise reports of spaghetti trees, your Nan can dance with Queens and the well brought up kids can knock on doors and beg for sweeties!

We all need an opportunity to have our naughty side sanctified, and our inversion rituals give us just that.

I was doing a thing on inversion rituals today and it got me thinking about my favourite inversion ritual – Carnival.

Once a year, I get the opportunity to cross the river (big deal for a sauff lundiner like me),  wear something best suited to the Sambodromo  in Rio (okay… not so rare for me), and dance in the streets where the average home sells for £1,094,274. (Yep… even Jax wouldn’t necessarily find dancing on Richard Curtis’s doorstep whilst dressed as a human bluebird an every day of the week kind of thing.)

The Notting Hill Carnival means the world to me.

Yeah… it helps that my Dad had an awful lot to do with the origins of what is now Europe’s biggest street party, but even if that was not true -  I would love this inversion ritual more than any other anyway.

This is England.

We are uptight in ways that very few nations could ever imagine. We care about things no one else in the world could ever have enough free time to even recognise as issues let alone give the time of day to. We are the contents of a pressure cooker day in day out.

We don’t mean to be so uptight… but we are.

We worry about what everyone thinks about us.

We never do just what we want.

We restrict ourselves into teeny tiny restrictive moulds that no one ever asked us to get in. We can’t quite believe that if we just do what makes us happy and respect each other ‘s boundaries we’d all rub along fine. So instead we act out a manuscript of ‘how to be perfect’ which truly isn’t who we are…. And it does our heads in.

But then…. Along comes the summer bank holiday.

After months of  keeping a low profile, dressing conservatively, keeping the noise down  avoiding eye contact, smiling thinly and constantly saying “Please … after you sir”, when in fact we are in a big hurry…..  FREEDOM!!! Two days of just being the person we’d like to be if only we weren’t so goddam British!

One and a half million of us surge onto the streets covering a tiny four square mile area.

Like peafowl we display our iridescent plumage and excite and charm the eye as we bounce to the rhythm beaten from a thousand different drums and sound systems. Normally emotionally distance members of constabulary bump and grind with scantily clad maidens, heavily decorated floats pass in procession, some spraying glitter, or bubbles or even chocolate into the crowds. The aromas of fresh cooked food floods the air as delicacies normally consumed on a Caribbean beach are roasted in kettle drums and sold for extortionate profit.  And the Red Stripe lager flows.

The government loves it as it contributes some £93 million to the UK economy. But more than that,  the inversion element is just damn good for us all. It’s letting the steam out the pressure cooker.

Never underestimate the power of inversion. Normally we get a two prong dilemma regarding any desire. The first is to act on impulse. The second is to repress.  Society is structured to make us repress, to avoid embarrassment, to be safe, to not take risks.  But along come the high days and holidays and we invoke inversion… we can finally act on impulse  - be who we would be if we were not boxed up so tightly from all the rules.

I’m not saying the rules are bad…. We need rules, we need structure – we as a species have shown time and time again that without them we pretty much descend into chaos. However having those special days where licence is given to violate everyday cultural norms, to let our hair down… well they do us a whole heap of good.

Impulse leads to some wild fantasy but often some brave choices, and some rugged truths .

And yeah… when dressed from head to toe in shimmering blue net with only feathers to cover your modesty, you definitely are immersed in a wild fantasy in which a big brave choice was made. And as for rugged truths…. You don’t get much closer to one than when your float as it turns the corner of Ladbroke Grove and someone hollers at you:

“BABY..... YOUR BUM SURE LOOKS BIG IN THAT!!!!”

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