WLG prepares for and parties at Portobello Winter Festival

Posted on 30/11/09

Nothing goes according to plan, does it… As the crowd gathered for one of the highlights of the opening of Portobello Winter Festival: the Thrill the World London’s – who looked amazing in their white make-up and ghostly attire – Michael Jackson tribute Chiller, a woman, who looked like she could be a crack addict, took her place by one of the pillars. The music started and the pillar-leaning woman leapt up and joined the dancers with her own cringe-worthy drunken prance.

I’ve been working on the PR for the festival, so my colleague and I were tempted to put together a mock blurb for the photo desks along the lines of ‘Cracking times in Portobello…’ to wind up the rest of the team. We certainly weren’t expecting as many column inches as Jarvis Cocker’s BRIT Awards incident, anyway. This Wednesday,  I’m  looking forward to seeing Abdelkadeer Saadoun, who has performed for Her Majesty The Queen, the Takaleed Drummers, and local band Rotten Hill Gang, who have a big following and supported Mick Jones' Carbon Silicon on seven of the eight Carbon Casino nights at Inn on the Green last year at the Portobello Winter Festival.

A couple of weeks ago I took a friend, who has lived in New York for five years, to see Little Fish, a musical which depicts the dark side of New York. We met one of the cast members, who lives in Ladbroke Grove, in the Finborough bar afterwards. My friend and he chatted about New York for a while and agreed they much prefer living in London. Last week I saw Dame Wendy Hall speak at a Living in a Digital World talk at the Science Museum. Dame Wendy was one of the first computer scientists to undertake serious research in multimedia and hypermedia and has been at its forefront ever since. Her current research includes applications of the Semantic Web and she predicts that the next stage after the current social web stage will be linked data, so eventually we might be able ask the internet a question and get a direct – and correct – reply. But, just as there was a dot.com crash in the ’90s because broadband hadn’t arrived in people’s homes, Dame Wendy predicts that there will be something else unforeseen which may even lead to another dot.com crash… I’m just wondering what will be in store for us throughout the rest of the Portobello Winter Festival… And I'm glad Martin Miller's Gin are giving away free cocktails between 6pm–7pm.