Talkin' 'Bout My G-G-Generation

I made a visit to Brighton to meet for the first time my lovely Facebook friend A. J. On arrival I walked down the street to an ATM machine. As I waited for my money to slide out, a homeless man appeared at my side, "Spare any cash can yer, mate?" I told him to wait just a minute. My money arrived and, feeling a surge of compassion, I pushed a £10 note into his grimy claw. He looked at it for a second, then said, "You're a diamond, sir! Now I can go and get something to eat!" I smiled and turned to walk away, but he then launched into a totally invented story about how he had just lost his money in some sort of railway-station-ticket-hitch. There, he lost me. He should have stopped at, "Spare any cash?". Anyway, at the end of my day in Brighton I passed him again, on my way up the hill, back to the station. He was lying unconscious by the side of a little shop with a couple of empty bottles at his side, so I'm glad to have been of some little help in his quest for oblivion.

A. J. showed me around the town. First, we stopped off at an antique shop to browse the fascinating junk. Then we called in at one of the original Mod shops, still there from the 1960s, so that he could buy a jacket. I bought a very nice watch with the Mod target design on its face, which I had seen in Melbourne last year, but at close to $200, it was out of my range: here, it was a mere £20.

Then to a lovely little pub for a drink.

Then it was on to the Pavilion - the beautiful, ostentatious, insane, Victorian Orientalist construction which, A. J. informed me, was originally built opposite a slum. The Prince Regent would travel up the hill by carriage and the slum-dwellers would jeer and throw rotten vegetables at him.

And then it was down to the pier, where we fed pieces of our freshly-cooked doughnuts to the enormous seagulls, who exhibited extraordinary aerobatic skills in their quest for saturated fat and sugar. There was some vaguely techno music playing on the speakers along the boardwalk. A. J. said that for it to be a true Brighton pier experience it really should have been David Essex and Slade instead. Walking back along the pier to the beach, we said goodbye and I wandered off along the very shore where the Mods and Rockers had had their memorable running battles in the mid-60s. Today, there were only white middle-class, dread-locked hippies selling junk jewellery from little stalls to the beautiful sound of the waves sloshing into the shingles.

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