Viva Brighton Issue #77 July 2019

COLUMN
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John Helmer
Fallen
Illustration by Chris Riddell
Chaining my bike to railings, I spot a silent disco
across the Pavilion Gardens. A group of people
in headphones, from that dangerous age group
best described as late-youth-meets-early-middleage,
are gyrating wildly to a beat only they can
hear while singing along enthusiastically to hits
from Grease: “Summer loving had me a blast...”
With their blissed-out expressions and jerky
movements they recall the wandering bands of
religious fanatics that plagued Medieval towns,
but there is something typically Brighton about
them. The whole scene is typically Brighton
in fact: the young families at the tables of the
Café—“So it’s a Nobbly Bobbly for you, River
… and what does Storm want?”—being played
Joni Mitchell songs by a straggle-bearded busker
with an oud (we are stardust, we are golden);
the foreign students sitting on the patch of
grass opposite the Pavilion where they always
sit, which has now been replaced by astroturf
because their sitting has worn the grass away;
the hen parties, the stag packs; the well-heeled
and the well-hung, the fabulous and the
destitute.
Brighton lives in the now, but also at an
intersection of many different times. Looking at
the Pavilion, you imagine the coaches trundling
down from London in Regency times. A brass
band summons up the era of Jimmy Edwards
and Gilbert Harding. And if I look across
towards the Corn Exchange I see a grassy incline
where I sat with a friend from school on my first
visit in 1974, when I was weighing up the offer
of a place from the university (there was only
one in those days).
We had already chucked pebbles in the sea,
visited both piers and done a clutch of pubs.
“I think you should come here,” he belched,
“definitely”.
I visit the toilet and find my way partially
blocked by two men in heated conversation.
They both have that suntan—not the unseasonal
skiing tan, or the two-weeks-in-Marbella-withthe-kids-tan,
but the one that goes with the neck
tattoos and spending too much time in the open
not by your own choice. “I’m f***ing buzzing,
man,” says one. They follow me in and take a
cubicle together. Loud snorting noises ensue.
“Do you believe in ghosts?,” my friend Hugh
the poet asked me the other day.
“Only the ones I see when I walk around
Brighton,” I answered, meaning old
acquaintances from the punk days who didn’t
stop taking the drugs when the rest of us
did. Now they live on the other side of an
invisible mental border like the ones in China
Miéville’s The City & the City, which prevents
us acknowledging or even registering
one another’s presence,
our sole point of
connection a guilty
coin-drop.
It’s always there, this
rough underside
to the smooth.
This place, with
its naked bike
rides, can look so
Edenic—until you spot
the pervs in the crowd
with their telephoto
lenses. The truth is we’re
fallen, and unreasonably
proud of it.
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