1.10.11

Brighton today played host to Muslims, Jews, Asians, West Indians, Alcoholics, Cockneys, Northerners, OAP’s, babies, and dogs. There were mountains of bodies. The red of skin, white of skin, the tanned of skin and the burnt of skin. There were teeming hoards of the tattooed, the pierced, the shaven and the bald.
The Pebbles played host to blankets, sunshades, sun hats, plastic food boxes, empty coke bottles, wooden lolly sticks, chick-lit, crime-lit, Saturday supplements, sun cream, burn cream, ice-cream and ipods.
Brighton heaved with the well heeled, low heeled, barefooted and wheel-chaired. The Tapas bars and chip shops cleared their tables in record time before the next pile of happy revellers were seated.
Lines of cars waited in the sweltering heat – the hottest October for 100 hundred years – to trickle into parking spaces sticky with dropped litter. The traffic wardens, still wearing cap and coats, dared not nick the hoi polloi who were out on mass.
I found a three foot space in between a family of Midlanders, I sat and smelt the ozone for three minutes. They complimented me on my white teeth and left to queue for a paper cup of coffee. I sat in the stones and marvelled at the sheer volume of day-trippers squashed horizontal in Sussex.
The collective need for respite from gloom, the universal desire for fun, the all encompassing capacity for humanity to sit side by side in the sweltering sun was truly breathtaking. For the first time in my life I felt like a British holiday maker.
I had my fifteen minutes of Spain by the carousel.
A glass of iced tap water and a few snaps on the camera to capture October 1st 2011 and then it was back to reality.
It’s now 59 degrees at 2.00 a.m. If it weren’t for ‘Strictly Come Prancing’ you could be forgiven for thinking that we weren’t in Pondicherry, home of vegetarian curries and joss sticks.
I’m off to bed now, window wide open and eyes wide shut….