Writing Set in Brighton.

[BadFish]

I started writing this a few years ago, What do you reckon?


Brighton, a small seaside town much like any other in England. Developed by the Prince Regent for rich **** to holiday in way back when, and let’s face it, it hasn’t changed much cos no fucker cares anymore, at least them rich fuckers cared about the place they knocked about in. Didn’t care about much else though did they? I look through the rain at the grand squares and lawns that echo those affluent days gone by. The low sky suffocates me as I battle against the wind, i turn my face away from the bitter cold and look out at where the shit brown sea meets the coal grey skies. The collapsing pier in the foreground hiding the glorified neon amusement arcade behind built to keep the peasants off the Ballrooms and Regency splendour of the other one. Time is a great leveller as now they are both piles of shit in their own way. “Trudging slowly over wet sand” I begin to sing to myself as I try to light a damp fag. “This is the seaside town that they forgot to close down. Armageddon.” You’re not too far wrong there, Morrisey and to think that this cold wet shit is supposed to be spring.

So why am I here? Why don’t I just stay at home in the warm? Well that is one of the ironies of my generation, X I believe we’re called or is it Y or why? Clever eh, f***ing guardian readers intelligises everything don’t they? Intelligises? Is that a word? I bet it would be if one of those fuckers said it, instead it’s just me being f***ing stupid and uneducated. Anyway the irony of us wasters, the underclass or whatever you want to call us is that we can’t get out of bed and down the dole office on time to sign on for free money, but we will go to extraordinary lengths to get to a party, in fact not a even a party just a nice place to get off our faces with our mates. In fact most of the time they are not actually that nice but that is the crazy devil may care don’t give a f*** world we live in.

I arrive at Jonesy’s place right opposite The Lion and Lobster a couple of hundred yards back for the seafront. It is a basement place that lacks a little in creature comforts like furniture but more than makes up for in n that lived in appeal. I knock loudly over the music... I knock again hurting my knuckles on the rough peeling paint....I continue knocking until i am greeted by Jonesy wearing a pair of shorts, a highly tasteless Hawaiian shirt and no shoes. As if this vision wasn’t unsettling enough I am almost knocked over by the wave of heat escaping out of the door. “Heating’s f***ed!” comes the explanation “Pull up a deck chair.” The sweet smell of skunk fills my nostrils as I walk down the narrow hallway into the lounge. I begin to laugh away the melancholy that was building up on the journey here as I set eyes on Moony, Moggsie and Dutch Rod sat in stripy deckchairs with their jeans rolled up, shirts off, clutching cocktails. Mooney nods a hello and passes me a reefer, the white handkerchief on his head slips forward and a knot hits him in the eye. “What the f*** are you lot drinking?” I demand.
“Margaritas!” says Jonesy as if nothing is strange “Want one?”
“f***ing right I do.” I say as I plonk myself down onto a deckchair. “So what’s the plan for tonight, Rod did you manage to blag the tickets?”
“Got the tickets mate, and managed to blag a bottle of tequila from work. You get the pills?”
I smile and lean back nodding and letting out a big cloud of smoke “Life is sweet tonight, Rod, life is sweet.” My sadness drifts off on the smoke and with the help of my mates and an altered state i start to think that spring is beginning after all.

 

[Gullywog]

you're not quite right in the head, are you?

 

[Taybha]

beat me to it

 

[BadFish]

I think it's a decent piece of creative writing. It's dysphemistic, but there is a positive nihilism that so many younger Brightonians can relate to.

Thanks Ibrahim I appreciate that. It is part of a much longer unfinished work that i am trying to knock into shape.

 

[Bwian]

The thread title had me expecting somebody asking where to buy some decent pens.

 

[Deleted User X18H]

This is my effort......sort of.

There's a bloke down on Brighton beach today wearing a T-shirt which reads 'Sex & Drugs & Sausage Rolls' – which just about sums up the seafront in my home town, with its bizarre mix of sauce, grit and comfort food.


The beach itself – pebbled, peopled, pitched on a daring tilt to the sea – isn't exactly what you'd write home about. Kylie Minogue, for one, never did: "Oh come on, I've been to Brighton," she once said. "Have you seen that place? I mean, the city itself is nice but the beach is full of rocks and pebbles! Not something I'm used to back home, I must say."

It irks me, but she has a point. There are arguably better beaches up the road at Climping, vast and romantic beneath the Turner sky, or at Rottingdean, with its rock pools and near-empty dreamscape. Brighton's beach, though, is about what's up. Or, more precisely, who's up. Usually, you'll find a fascinating collection of specimens in among the eight million tourists who rock up each year. Just as Brighton has its own micro-climate (the locals reckon it's a few degrees warmer than you'll find north of the Downs), so it has its own human sub-species of what rock critic Steven Wells called "crusty-wusty, hippy-dippy, twat-hatted, ning-nang-nongers". Again, fair point. But they're my ning-nang-nongers. And I love them.

I particularly love the skateboarding terrier who performs tricks down by the pétanque pitch, and the Somalian guy forever playing the mbira, on and on, day on day until it has become the song of the sea in these parts. I love the bracing, embracing liberalism of the place. The whatever-ness, the anything-goes. Not long ago, a giant Lego man washed up on the beach, and everyone just shrugged and got on with getting along.

The beach – all 614 billion pebbles of it, cast out beneath the hulk of the Thistle Hotel and the scandalously ugly Brighton Conference Centre – is really the people, not the place. The whole scene moves, grooves, ebbs and flows like the roiling sea beyond. On a summer's day, laced between the tangle of tourists who've paid a fortune to park and more again for a sorry portion of fish'n'chips in a polystyrene tray, you find the city's fitness fanatics, the gad-abouts, the fly guys and the show-offs, most of them on wheels. Skateboards, mountain boards, rollerblades, road bikes, unicycles, trikes, buggies, the occasional penny farthing – they're all jockeying for position down on the prom, while up on the road above, it's still more wheels, from the tailgating traffic to the swarms of Lambrettas, Harleys, classic cars or naked cyclists which descend in their thousands each year to peacock about down by the pier.

Besides being a glorious gaudy sideshow, though, Brighton beach is a living, working environment. There are police patrols and beach cleaners, professional dog walkers, cockle and whelk vendors, lifeguards, DJs, barmen and baristas and a man who will walk the length of the strip to tell you that you can't have your dog on this particular beach (there are designated dog areas; even anarchy needs rules). An idle ice-cream eater can wander past beach volleyballers, barefoot joggers, paddleboarders, kayakers, basketball players (very serious, very tall, huge shorts), stunt-bike riders, Fit Bitch trainees, a handful of tentative bikini wearers with goosebumped buttocks, Ultimate Frisbee freaks and a geezer making meaningless sculptures with sand. At night, the music kicks up and the beach chills out, home now to the pot smokers, night paddlers and the punters at the Fortune O' War pub, which sells beer in plastic pints so you can take it down to the water's edge and look for phosphorescence.

It's a sensual place, this beach. The view to the horizon as an orange sun sets equals any in the world, whatever Kylie says. There's power here, and an odd, messy kind of glory. It's about the naked black bones of the West Pier, stark against the sky, and the starlings in their cloud formations, circling the Palace Pier's Helter Skelter, sketching pictures in the air. It's the hurdy-gurdy twang of the carousel, the art galleries tucked into the salty arches and the lazy thump of chill-out music coming from tired beach-club speakers the morning after the night before, while a guy with sleeve tattoos and multiple piercings sweeps last night's spilled beer and broken promises into the gutter. It's the countless fallen hens in pink cowboy hats flaked out on the beach in recovery position, still wearing last night's glitter eyeshadow and angel wings. As they snore, a singer on a bar stool outside the Brighton Music Hall croons Frank numbers into a microphone, "Fly Me to the Moon" soaring up above the bacon baps and hot sweet tea.

My favourite stretch by far is the fishing quarter. There's a quaint little museum here, a place plucked out of time and shoved under the arches, recalling the days when the beach was heavy with boats, tackle and catch and Brighton's industry was fish, not fun. These days, the ocean-going vessels are mostly weekend sail boats and Hobie Cats, launched on Sunday mornings from the Brighton Sailing Club (the Club is run by a couple called Roger and Virginia Barnacle, which is so perfect it makes my heart sing). Up the way, you can still buy wet fish from Jack and Linda's Smokehouse, jellied eels in tubs (this is London-by-Sea after all) or a hot mackerel sandwich.

Further west from the Pier, things glide upmarket and the residents of Hove have their own beach quarter – an 'esplanade', if you please – up past the renovated Victorian bandstand where you can get hitched or simply pitch up for a macchiato, beyond the string of pea-green huts (the colour is designated by the Council, and woe betide non-conformists), past Hove lawns and out to the Lagoon. In the other direction, off to the east, the Volks Electric Railway will haul you along at sedate pace, past the Sea Life Centre, which always smells of boat bottoms and seaweed to me, past the rock climbing wall and the screeching playgrounds, below the great Regency crescents, vanilla, decadent and voluptuously curved, beyond the nudist beach at Kemptown ("a bit nippy in the winter"), to the soulless wastes of the concrete Marina and back. There's a giant Asda there, and it feels like the end of the world.

Back on the beach, beyond its daily quirks, there's a perpetual roster of races, championships and parades, the runs and rallies, the festivals, the circuses, big events like Pride, Paddle Round the Pier and the Burning of the Clocks, when paper lanterns are released to mark the Winter Solstice. The seafront is soon to get jazzier still with the arrival of a 45m-high Ferris wheel and, if sponsorship materialises, the i360, a towering observation needle allowing visitors to ascend to 150m and see far up into the skirts of England and out into the Channel, some say as far as France.

Not that I'd want to go. Sit for a while on Brighton beach, and you'll get the drift. People say it's impossible to be a misfit here, and I reckon that's about right: 600 billion pebbles, don't forget, and no two of them the same.

 

[Seagull kimchi]

Great stuff both of you.

Both visions evoked memories of a place I sadly haven't visited for 10 years.

 

[jason852]

I think this one is really a nice thread, and a huge information we all can get from this one.

 

[skipper734]

Great stuff Tim. I could almost be there, I wish I was.

 

[BadFish]

Nice work HB&B made me very nostalgic and a bit homesick.

 

[glasfryn]

Great stuff Tim. I could almost be there, I wish I was.

agreed

 

[Buzzer]

Boy, are you people gullible. It can't be HB&B's piece for several reasons:

1. There are few spelling mistakes and the grammar is good
2. Lack of !!!!!!!!!!exclamation marks!!!!!!!!shift+1!!!
3. The piece has humility and warmth
4. It doesn't have some sneery reference to people who can't trace their roots back 1000 years
5. It was published in the Independent earlier today

http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/uk/brighton-anything-goes-at-this-liberal-enclave-2317532.html

 

[skipper734]

Maybe his pen name is Mimi Spencer! I should have noticed, at least the difference in style.

 

[Hunting 784561]

Maybe Timmy's alter-ego goes by the name of Mimi ?

 

[Deleted User X18H]

Maybe Timmy's alter-ego goes by the name of Mimi ?

Me Me Me!!!

 

[BadFish]

Well at least mine is an origninal piece of writing. I thought HB&B's peice was a little liberal, come one come all and viva la difference for what i know of him.