I’m starting to sense a pattern here. Whenever I discover something accidentally, it is normally when I’m in a pursuit of food.

It happened again last Sunday. I was getting hungry after having a nice lie-in, and I stepped out of the flat very sure of one thing: I would like to have a hoisin duck wrap from Pret-A-Manger, a fruit smoothie and possibly a high-fibre muffin. So I set off, with the firm purpose in mind, to look for the nearest Pret-A-Manger.

But soon I got distracted by the thumping noise that seemed to come from just down the road. Since I did not know where the nearest Pret anyway, I decided to just follow the noise and see what was happening and turned back to take the tube from the station I normally go.

Except that I lost my bearing as soon as I walked a different way. When I chanced upon the street map, I seemed to have already veered pretty far from where I was supposed to go (and I still had not found the source of the noise by the way). So I decided to go to the nearest tube station shown on the map, Royal Oak. By that point in time, I was already very hungry and could not wait to see Pret.

As it turned out, Royal Oak tube station was closed for the day, and I was told to keep walking to the next tube station, Bayswater. Grumpily, I kept walking, not realising that I was walking right into the Notting Hill Carnival, the biggest street carnival in Europe!

When I finally figured out what was going on, I got really excited and decided to explore what was happening in the carnival.

Although I may have forgotten about Pret and the hoisin duck wrap, I have not forgotten my hunger. When I saw this yummy chicken kebab, I just had to have it.

Ok enough about food. Let me show you some of the fascinating things that I saw in the carnival.

Just in case you are wondering, I did not end up finding any Pret on that day. Funny how when you are not looking for something, they always appear, but when you do, you can’t find them at all!