One grey and rainy day in Somerset last month, we decided to entertain our large number of small girls by taking them shopping to the Clarks Retail Outlet. Or, more accurately, to bung them £20 and let them spend it on tawdry last-season garments while we lolled around in Starbucks. Don't worry, I'm not going to write about that day, it can be imagined all too easily. Too much rain, too little parking, too many children to supervise - and the fatal mistake of buying heavy things from the cookshop at start rather than the end of the session. I'm a slow learner.
On the drive across from our cottage, we approached from the west a drab grey town hunched gloomily against the rainy horizon. Where were we? we wondered. We came closer and a sign informed us that we were arriving at Bridgwater: The Home of Carnival.
Excuse me. The Home of Carnival? Surely there are other places that can lay better claim than that? Rio de Janeiro, Venice, Notting Hill, even? There is obviously some essential truth I've missed about Bridgwater, with its pound-shops and its closed-down pubs and its absence of bypass and its bypassing of quaint charm.
The interweb informs me it was 44th on the list of Britain's Crap Towns, with Hull coming at number 1. This is quite, quite wrong. Hull is chockful of history, and fine buildings, and river front and heritage and white phone boxes - and is soon to have an achingly funky History Centre to prove it.
So I tried to find out why Bridgwater is the Home of Carnival. It seems the town has a procession on Guy Fawkes evening. This is, according to the website, the largest and best illluminated procession in the world. That's the whole world, right, not the whole world of Somerset. So it must be better than, say, the Christmas Parade at Disneyland. This seems rather unlikely but I'm prepared to suspend my belief. In fact I'm making it a Quiz Of The Week. Right hand side, down there.
I know you can't wait to go, so here's the website. Party on, dudes.
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