I’d taken things a bit easy on Saturday, only walking from Trafalgar Square at the top of Whitehall to Parliament Square at the bottom. On Sunday I made up for this, starting down in the deep south at Thornton Heath, with a chariot festival by Hindus from the temple in Thornton Road, originating from the Tamil areas in south-east India and Sri Lanka.
They were dragging a chariot containing a statue of the Lord Muruga and people were coming up with offerings of fruit on trays, which were blessed by the god and returned with flames licking around them.
When the procession turned off the main road I jumped on a bus that had been held up behind it, hoping for a rapid journey to Brixton. Unfortunately we crawled slowly until after we had cleared some minor roadworks on Streatham Hill. From Brixton, the next bus took me to the Oval and Kennington Park.
The area around here has the largest Portuguese population outside of Portugal, and most of them would be along here later in the day to eat, drink and celebrate being Portuguese and the greatest of Portuguese poets, Luís de Camões, who died on 10 June, 1580. The event started with an open-air Catholic mass, and I left as this was drawing to a close to catch a 436 ‘bendy bus’ to Marble Arch.
Although a possible danger to cyclists – such as the new Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, these really offer a fast and efficient service on routes such as this. A major plank of Boris’s election manifesto was the scrapping of these and their replacement by some mythical updated Routemaster, but I think on suitable routes this would be a loss.
At Marble Arch, Sikhs were holding a rally before a march to remember the Indian massacres of 1984, and to call for the establishment of an independent Sikh state of Khalistan.
I finally ended up at some kind of Korean festival in Trafalgar Square, which seemed to simply be a rather boring sell of Korea as a tourist destination. I’d hoped it might be a festival for the many Koreans who live in London, particularly around New Malden.
