TOWNS across the UK are holding traditional summer carnivals which should have died out with the medieval peasants who invented them. Here’s why yours will be a huge bag of shite.
Tat charity stalls
You can avoid charity shops by not going in, but come carnival day they’ll collectively vomit their tatty assortment of tacky ornaments, dog-eared paperbacks and dead pensioners’ musty old clothes onto the busy high street. You’ll feel like a heartless bastard if you ignore their pathetic pleas for custom right under your nose. Then worry that karma has decided not buying Firefox Down from Cancer Research means you’ll get cancer.
The tiny float procession
Before the internet when nobody had anything to do, every school, scout group and junior football team in town would dress up and decorate the back of a trailer to join in the carnival cavalcade. Now three half-hearted entries trundle silently past, sparsely populated with a handful of kids with no friends. At least they don’t cause massive traffic jams for normal people trying to get to Tesco on Saturday for the big shop. Every cloud, etcetera.
The creepy carnival princess contest
Back in the days when sexism and misogyny were as normal as flared jeans and Spangles, the Carnival Queen Competition was hugely prestigious and a nirvana for casual perverts wanting to ogle attractive teenage girls. Its replacement consists of a princess event, where show-off mums dress their reluctant offspring in ridiculously flowery dresses, with the losers bursting into tears or throwing a temper tantrum – a lot like the original.
The pissing rain
It’s the law in Britain that come carnival weekend, it must absolutely twat it down from dawn till dusk. The never-say-die, bollocks-to-common-sense British mindset dictates you still have to turn out regardless. However if it turns into a full-blown thunderstorm there’s the fun of hoping the twat dressed as a clown on ten-foot stilts takes a direct lightning hit.
Shit street food
Carnivals in countries like Spain, Italy and Mexico are a gastronomic smorgasbord of delicious food, from extravagant seafood paellas cooked on the streets of Seville to fresh churritos served piping hot. Not here. Take your pick from greasy burgers of questionable origin reeking of stale cooking fat, stall after stall laden with sickly fudge, or that most British of culinary atrocities, a baked potato adorned with a smear of baked beans it’s impossible to eat standing up. And that’s before you’ve bought any candy floss, which you can share with wasps landing on your face.
The funfair rides
Choke to death on diesel fumes as a crappy assortment of ‘fun rides’ for children take up residence where the bloody footpath used to be. From the bloke with the shit miniature train ride, whose odd choice of career must surely be due to paedophilia, to the battered dodgem cars driven by psychotic seven-year-olds, it makes the ill-fated Dismaland look like a high-end version of Alton Towers. It is, however, exciting for your elderly parents, who will clutch their purses and wallets in fear, convinced that the ride workers with clear Midlands accents are Romanian gypsy immigrants out to pick their pockets.
