Viva Brighton Issue #65 July 2018

COLUMN
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John Helmer
Purple Rain
Illustration by Chris Riddell
“Are the flowers here different from ones you sell in
your shop?” asks the florist.
“Pretty much the same,” says my wife, also a florist.
“Of course, we all buy from the same place.”
“Holland.”
They laugh.
We’re in Lisbon, which is full of Jacaranda trees, a
native of Central and South America and a remnant
of Lisbon’s colonial past. Next day in the café at the
Flea Market that’s held in the shadow of the Church
of São Vicente de Fora, we meet another import: a
South African jeweller and story-teller in an Indiana
Jones fedora, who leans over from an adjacent table
and asks me how I’m enjoying my baked octopus.
“It’s great,” I say, “and it arrived much faster than
the one I had in Brighton last year, which took two
hours.”
“You’re from Brighton! I lived in Brighton for a few
years.”
“What part?”
“Do you know Hove Town Hall?”
“I was there yesterday buying parking permits.”
“I got my British citizenship there… anyway, I lived
near Hove Town Hall. I really think that’s the nicest
part of Brighton, don’t you?”
“Well… no.”
“I did love Brighton - but I couldn’t believe the
price of mung beans in that shop in North Laine -
oh, you know the one… like Buzz Lightyear…”
I can’t believe I came all the way to Lisbon to have
a conversation about the price of mung beans in
Infinity Foods. “So where do you live now?”
“I’m sort of in the process of working that out.
Portugal has no respect for craft... and obviously
Britain’s out because of Brexit...”
“—Not to mention the price of Mung Beans.”
“I’ve been thinking about Dublin. I’m related to
WB Yeats…”
“I will arise now and go to Innisfree,” I quote. The
waiter gives me a bica and a funny look. My wife,
who has family in Dublin, chips in with suggestions.
The jeweller takes out an exercise book and makes
notes in a large, clear hand. Clear enough for me to
see they’re wrong.
“The thing about Irish place names,” I mansplain,
“is that some of them are spelled exactly the way
you say them, like Dalkey, whereas others, like Dún
Laoghaire…”
“Dublin’s so wet, though.”
“Try Trieste. Like Dublin, according to James
Joyce, but with sun. No idea about the price of
mung beans there though.”
I try to imagine what it must
be like to have to a free
choice about where
to settle, and wonder
whether you spoil the
magic of places by trying
to actually live in them.
Rooted to Brighton
by family, friends and
work, I see past holiday
destinations through
botanically tinted
spectacles; the pink of
sakura in springtime
Kyoto, the peat-fed
green of the Wicklow
mountains - and now,
forever, the luminous
purple that Jacaranda trees
rain on the streets of Lisbon
as they wind their way down
to the Tagus.
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