Can I find my tribe in Brighton?

Recently I lost my mother, my job and nearly my wife in quick succession (she was diagnosed with breast cancer). My son now needles me by asking what I do all day. ‘Son, I have seen things you wouldn’t believe. I have dark thoughts.’ That is what I want to say, but I don’t have the courage. It is hard to explain to an 11-year-old that the black dog can be as demanding as any full-time employer. Besides he wouldn’t get the Blade Runner reference. But his niggling question makes me realise I am a man in need of an alibi, or another alias.

My grandfather S.P.B. Mais earned his keep as a novelist, broadcaster, gossip columnist and schoolteacher. As ‘the first travel journalist of the airwaves’, he was one of the most famous BBC voices of the 1930s and pioneered the ‘Letter from America’ format a decade before Alistair Cooke.

But he dissipated his talents by churning out books to keep the bailiffs at bay. Sometimes he had three on the go at once. With titles such as Some Books I Like and I Return to Switzerland, his bibliography, if not his muse, was inexhaustible and he penned more than 200 books, all of them out of print and (like him) forgotten. But his favourite county and the subject to which he returned was Sussex. It was not the county of his birth, but the county of his adoption. ‘In my eyes it has but one drawback,’ he wrote.’ It ruins one for everywhere else.’

Nearly 50 years after his death I have relocated from Oxfordshire to his beloved south coast. It does not feel like a homecoming as I have never liked shingle beaches, dive-bombing seagulls or shabby seaside resorts and I know not a single soul here.