thursday: DIVE OFF THE PIER

(see below for previous two installments of my Brighton local travel diary sort of a thing)

thanks to Patrick for the photo

Thursday, Thursday… even less ready for life on Thursday morning. But Thursday is the last day and there is a helluva lot remains to be done. By now I must confess the events of these three days are muddled indeed: there are a couple of bookshops I want to say we looked in on Thursday but I’m suspicious we actually saw them Wednesday; well, for form’s sake (Tuesday was poetry, Wednesday was pubs and jazz – what can be said of Thursday if not shopping?) let me now pretend that all shopping occurred on Thursday.

wednesday: DRINK THE JAZZ

(see below for the first installment of my Brighton local travel diary)

thanks to Patrick for the photo

Then Wednesday came a little groggy. But breakfast, coffee, gitanes on the wooden pallets that pass for decking in my back garden, there in the burning morning sun and I was burning to go to the sea. We walked down into town with only a couple of stops down North Laine to look in the Amnesty Bookshop, and I bought two books from Sandpiper Books, which is an excellent bookshop for art, film; culturey sort of books (I bought Generation of Swine by Hunter S. Thompson and Notes of a Dirty Old Man by Bukowski). They have new books at very cut prices, so I bought my first new books in a very long time.

To the sea. But although the sun was hotter, the wind was stronger also and it was not quite hot enough, and when the guitar-playing 28p-scrounging juice-drinking fellow from yesterday turned up just behind us it was like a sign to get the hell out of there.

tuesday: THREE WAYS TO HEAR A POEM

thanks to Patrick for the photo

I’m going to write something about Brighton. I was lured out by the sun and by a visit from my friend Patrick, so I played the tourist a while and thought it was time I shared something of the best of Brighton. Three days is not enough to do everything in Brighton, I discovered, but we did manage to do quite a lot. Read on for a travel diary of an illicit midweek holiday…

Tuesday.

It has been a delightful week here in Brighton: waking up to the feverish blue sky on Monday I knew we were in for a treat. It is the first week of the Easter holidays and I was ready to begin some serious work on my term papers, but then my friend Patrick came to visit with Lance (my new friend, oui?!) and it all went to hell; or, more likely– to the sea.