What a ride and experience that was!  My eldest was seeing her friend perform with the Carnival Collective, see:

http://youtu.be/t-sgAo45v-4

at Concorde2 in Brighton. They are a 30 – 50 piece band with about 30 percussionists, a la Brazilian carnival processions complete with a horn section (sax, trumpet, trombone and incredibly a euphonium!) and guitars and drums etc, along with up to four vocalists.  The sound was absolutely amazing and drove along at a hell of a pace, although I didn’t recognise any of the songs.  It was a mixture of drum ‘n bass, salsa, samba, latin rhythms and rock.  The music made you jig along with it (carefully in my case), and couldn’t but fail to move you.  The whole day was a free event at the Concorde, where I’ve paid to see the likes of Steve Winwood, and will be seeing The Beat (Tears of a Clown, Mirror in the Bathroom etc )there later this year (remember them?).

Brighton is a very lively place and seems to be a collective place for many different types of character, I suppose it’s a sort of mini-London with a beach and fresh air. Still it was interesting to people-watch. Just outside the Concorde there were stalls selling all different kinds of food, including goat curry which I’ve always fancied trying.  It was unfortunately a typical Bank Holiday weather day, bits of sunshine and later lots of rain.  The trouble is that is the last public holiday until Christmas, when all the others are crammed into a small time-frame between April and August.  The debate about public holidays has raged on for years and they never change, except of course the ‘May Day’ holiday the last new one. This is however a socialist sap to those who champion labour values and is to me a complete waste of time which nobody cares for at that time of the year, with the later old ‘Whitsun’ public holiday in the same month.  My view is scrap all public and bank holidays, they are a anachronism and belong to the past. In these days of flexible, part time working and 24 hour banking the ‘Bank Holiday’ seems superfluous.  Do the banks actually need a day off every so often to sort themselves out? I doubt it, and for everyone else who benefits from Bank Holidays, wouldn’t they prefer to take these days off when it suits them rather than the state. I would of course exclude Easter and Christmas Day from this because they are religious holidays, the rest are for the benefit of the banks, or not.  Perhaps employers should add the 4 or 5 bank holidays we get a year on to employees annual leave entitlement, so that businesses can stay open every working day, and employees have more freedom to chose their time off?  Off my soap box – for now.