G&P Travel Special - Postcard from Brighton

A weekend enjoying the sights, sounds, smells and sensations of the South Coast's epicentre of gaiety.

If you are visiting Brighton you will need to adjust the settings on your fabulousness meter.  Because in Brighton all - air, architecture, atmosphere and inhabitants - is fabulous.

“the horses seem alive to the organ music of the carousel”

Coming in from the sea, slate grey this February weekend with foamy rollers swishing the shingle, two stubby piers jut out over the water.  One is alive with the sounds and smells of the seaside, the buzz and jingle of the arcades, the organ music of the carousel, the screams and shrieks of those riding the improbably tiny, narrow-gauge roller coaster situated at the very end of the pier (and where better to site a metal structure that has to be perfectly safe and is daily subjected to stresses and strains than in an environment conducive to rust!), and the scent of doughnuts and chips.  The other pier looks like an X Ray of a pier, a pier fossil, a ruin of twisted metal slowly falling into the sea and, above all, a picturesque counterpoint to the colour of its companion.

Coming inland, past the boys on their jet skis who circle and spurt with speed whilst the pierside audience look on and think 'you know what would make that more fun?  Lances!', past the place wherein sunnier days boys leap from the sea wall into the foamy waves, like  a wannabe Acapulco cliff diver, but with better access to chips, to the famous pebbly beach.

Sitting on Brighton beach is the very definition of uncomfortable.  When you go for a day at the beach you don't bring a towel, you bring a mattress.  And yet it has its charms.  You can get sand at the builders' merchant, beaches are a little harder to come by.

“Reaching the water he swings the bucket back”

Crunching towards the waves like a shy and determined Reggie Perrin is a man with a white bucket and an attendant cloud of increasingly excited gulls.  This is the man from the seafood restaurant on the front who has decided to get rid of his fish scraps in a way that does not pollute his bin nor tax the refuse men.  Reaching the water he swings the bucket back and forth and throws a stream of guts and heads and wobbly bits that not even the great British public would eat no matter how fried and none of it hits the water.  Instead, it is engulfed by a dense cloud of gulls who take the fish from the very air.

Inshore from the beach is the boardwalk.  The residents of Brighton are by far the most wheeled population on the planet.  In-line skaters weave in and out of kids and adults on scooters and pensioners riding mobility chariots.  It's rare to be or see a pedestrian although if you do, they will most likely be eating chips or drinking coffee.  Back from the boardwalk a little are the little shops, arches containing galleries selling views of Brighton, or cafes doing the most wondrous whitebait.  I ate mine sat in the winter sunshine listening to the happy (?) shrieks from the pier and unmolested by the satiated gulls.

“it’s a long way down to those pebbles”

There were kids setting up little cones and weaving their way in and out of them on their skates while filming one another in the hope of Youhootube fame and despite the month there were a quartet of hardy homosexualists playing volleyball on a court of presumably imported sand.  Near the ruined pier a tightrope walker who was either a trainee or who had no head for heights was practicing on a cable he had strung up about four inches above the beach.  Even so, it's a long way down to those pebbles.

A seafront road separates the beach from Brighton's seafront hotels.  With a little bit of clever marketing I am sure that Brighton's traffic could become an attraction in itself, unless you are stuck in it.  Actually it's not so much the traffic as the parking, but everyone seems to acknowledge this and accept that any trip to Brighton will involve an hour queuing to get into a car park and an hour to get out.  The benefit is that you can only get in when the is a space, so there is none of that endlessly circling like an increasingly irritated shark looking for a space.  There is a space, you just have to find it.  Unless you wish to start entertaining paranoid fantasies about the whole thing being a conspiracy to put you off your whitebait.

By the way, don't just join any queue thinking the bloke in front knows what he is doing.  I did this initially, waiting behind a car that was parked in front of a closed gate to a car park (the gates rattle up and down to control parking, obviously barriers are not a sufficient disincentive to a determined visitor) and noticed that cars lined up behind me.  Had the bloke in front found a secret car park...no, he'd found a closed car park entrance.  Still, only took me ten minutes to realise.

Lining the seafront are Brighton's hotels.  Grand in the most part and, in the case of one, The Grand.  I stayed in the Thistle and had possibly the best receptionist experience in a chain hotel ever.

God alone knows what the staff are on that allow them to put up with testy English tourists, I suspect the hotel's policy is that they recruit from places with terrifying human rights records, and the staff think that anything short of being shot for sneezing or something is basically a hug.  Certainly the team on the desk were exceptionally charming.  Forgot your toothbrush? Here's one.  Payment?  Er, no, it's a little plastic toothbrush, it's free to guests.  This is not Ryanair.

And the breakfast was magnificent.  What it was, I can't quite recall, but it's taken in a room with a panoramic view of the sea arriving on the beach on a brisk February morning.  Bracing, and so much better enjoyed in the warm with tea and toast and quite possibly a kipper.

Lurking behind the hotels are The Lanes.  In any other city the narrow maze of streets and shops might be slightly off putting.  Here, they are, well, fabulous.  The Lanes are renowned for their antique and jewellery and antique jewellery shops and in the twinkly interiors you can see young couples pondering important rings and things.  Of course, buying an engagement ring is a tricky thing and is, I consider, best done alone.  Certainly it was quite an interesting tableau that featured in the interior of one shop, where a chap was obviously bargaining hard with the proprietor while his girlfriend stood beside him with a look that communicated 'I never knew that Rodney was this cheap.  I hope to leave this shop with a ring and a fiancée, but I love and want that ring and if it comes to a choice of one or the other, adios Rod'.

Other shops sell many things that you did not know you needed until you saw them, mostly colourful and twinkling and priced at the artisan end of the market.  Away from The Lanes are other, grooves shops, including the fabulous 'Vegetarian Shoes' which presumably sells plastic footware but, this being Brighton, is fabulous and not remotely sweatily squeaky.  Other shops sell essentials for the bohemian inhabitants of Fabulous-on-Sea and look not unlike Panto supply stores.

Because Brighton is bohemian.  In Brighton, even the beggars have a certain something.  A handful of my change, after meeting one of them on the pavement.  The poor lady was in such a state trying to explain that she wasn't a drug addict that I wanted to say 'no, no, spend it on crack, who am I to judge'.

Faced with a bewildering array of independent cafes and food places, we settled on Jamie's, because you know where you are with a load of cured meat served on a plank.

“Brighton’s crowning glory is the Pavillion”

In the winter sunshine, Brighton's crowning glory is the Pavilion.  Domes and minarets soar over the streets and the Ottoman vibe is only slightly offset by the ice skating rink in the garden.  It's somehow fitting to see something quite so out of place here, among the Victorian shops and cobbled streets, minutes from candy floss and gulls, standing gleaming in winter sunshine against a flawless blue sky and a musical backdrop of an actually decent busker on a guitar, as if anything less would be unacceptable.

This is a town very much aware of its own status, which works hard at maintaining the facade of fabulousness and where even the faded grandure can pass itself of as antique and shabby chic.  It's also, without a doubt, the place where the dirty weekend has almost attained heritage status and hence respectability.

But mostly, it's just fabulous.