BRIGHTON BLUES

I am still rather hoping that the Beloved wasn't sending me subliminal messages from Brighton last week when she sent me this photograph of the view from her hotel room. It took me a while to notice the secret message, but when I finally did, I did begin to wonder.

Still, she appears to have found her attendance at conference fulfilling, and returned with a bigger clutch of pictures from those two days than we expect her folks will have taken during their recent week  in Italy, and seemingly impressed enough with Brighton itself to want us to return there at some point.

Meanwhile, I don't have fond memories of my own one weekend spent visiting Brighton, to be honest, even though it was a fairly long time ago now…

I mean, it's a lovely place and all that sort of thing, but my own memories are rather clouded by the circumstances of that trip so many years ago where I acted as unofficial chauffeur to my house-mates whose primary objective seemed to be to visit some friends of one of them and for her to "fix up" her friends in a very contrived manner.

It was something of a "house holiday" from the days in which I had "room-mates" and involved me getting home from work on a Friday evening, loading up the car, and driving south to arrive at the flat of someone I'd never met before at around half-past one in the morning.

After the inevitable late-night chat, I was then parked on the sofa of this stranger for a few short hours whilst my friends went off and sought out accommodations elsewhere, did my usual thing of waking up far before the rest of the household, and was dragged to the bedsit of another complete stranger to play gooseberry for several hours.

I think that there was strolling along the beach at some point, and I don't recall much of the Saturday night, but after a pleasant enough Sunday lunch at a pub with another group of strangers, and a brief visit to a plot of land which had apparently once been owned by the family of one of my house-mates, we drove all the way back home again, and never returned.

But I do have fond recollections of those white Georgian streets which ran at right angles to the promenade, and those moments when the sea was visible between the buildings as we crossed the roads and, despite those less-than-fond recollections, perhaps I would like to return at some point, because the pictures that the Beloved took - secret messages notwithstanding - did make the place seem far more appealing than I remember it.

If only to give the place another chance.