I expect there are those among you who are pleased to see their home towns returning to something like normality this summer. Well, not me.
Brighton and Hove was bliss during lockdown. Without the endless Southward drift of London chaff – pronounce that word anyway you feel works, hard F or soft – my adopted home regained something of the elegance that had led Noel Coward to include it and its seagulls in a list of things that have style.
Now, it has become once again the Brighton that Keith Waterhouse said, had the perpetual air that of a town that is helping the police with their inquiries.
Brighton does not so much attract visitors, one sometimes thinks, so much as end up with them, in the same way that dust bunnies end up under the bed and behind the radiator, leaves end up in the basement stairwell and a greasy coagulant ends up around the base of a down pipe. They simply gravitate, due south from the Smoke to the Sea, the path of least resistance, least policing and least imagination. Politics maybe downstream of culture but Brighton’s culture is downstream of geography and demographics and nothing can argue with that.
How different it was, only a year ago. With the day-trippers, had gone the discarded chip wrappers, the broken bottles, the fag butts and gum.There were nights last April, a month into Armageddon, when I walked my dog along a promenade that was as silent as a film set, moonlight and starlight and an elegantly rippling sea, and the Regency facades so beautiful, one expected, Ray Milland to step out, gloved and hatted and ready to plan a murder, or Gene Kelly to emerge and look disappointed that it wasn’t raining.
The gulls too briefly wound their long, alarmingly muscular necks in. Less mouth-breathing human trash meant less actual trash for them to subsist on and they were forced instead to relearn the art and guile of their ancestors and become once more actual herring gulls, rather than the low life opportunist thieves of the summer season. Now they are back, the train-borne effluvia, the fast foodies, and the gulls too have relapsed. Few of them even bother to risk mugging a live tourist for her sandwich or ice cream. Instead, they dine in luxury by ripping open the bulging post-picnic plastic bags left optimistically near the sea front wheelie bins.
I have regretfully withdrawn from the seafront for the summer, and regard it once more as Brighton’s industrial base, the location of its principle export business, and no more appropriate for a resident to visit than it would be for one in Manchester or Bristol to visit the local factories, sweat shops or docks. The seafront business rates pay for the roads to be regularly dug up and the cycle lanes to be re-imagined every couple of months, so we really can’t complain.
But dogs must be walked and it turns out that even the parks are still deformed by the back wash of the pandemic.
C.S. Lewis famously observed that, of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. This unearned moral superiority I have never seen more vividly expressed than by the personal trainers and their clients who have sprung up across Hove Park like a cross between the carpetbaggers of the reconstruction, and the women forced into prostitution in the ruins of wartime Napoli.
There have long been a few exercise groups operating in the middle of the park. It began years ago with an outfit calling itself British Military Fitness, abbreviated on their van to BritMilFit. and even though this seemed deliberately chosen to have created the eye-catching segment ‘MILF’ they were running a pretty exacting session from what I could see and lots of otherwise sedentary middle aged individuals were being put through their paces in the fresh air. Fair enough.
But since the closure of the gyms, the place has become riddled with as many dismal one-to-one displays of futile delusion as you will see outside a high-end cruise ship hairdresser.
I cannot decide which I like the least – the self-indulgent overweight oaf paying someone, what, £20? £30? an hour, to watch them become marginally breathless with a kettlebell, or the undoubtedly fit and active young men who team up to punch and kick one another in public, taking it in turns to wear the large pads that protect their hands and field the blows. And they are invariably situated, for whatever reason, not in the wider park but actually on the path. Presumably it is a better terrain for practising the skills they will be using later that evening to mug a pensioner.
But if the giant jostle for public space has taught me anything it’s that my health – mental, and physical – feels a good deal less contingent on the behaviour of others, than it did just over a year ago, when the nation was safely locked up indoors, and the streets belonged to me, and my dog.
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