The Hoves And The Hove-Nots

With Jocasta away for the day (on a North African vegan cooking and knitting course in Devon) and Pierre, our gay male au pair back home in Mauritius for a holiday (he was planning to come out to his uber-conservative parents), I decided to make the most of the trés bonne weather and take Lex and Nimsie to the playground for a bit of old-skool fun down at The Level, thus eschewing our usual museum/art gallery/picnic in Queen's Park routine.

I was in particularly cheery mood that morn, as I had just received word that an influential Film4 producer wanted to meet me for coffee the following day to discuss my Frank Bough biopic.

However, within five minutes of arriving at the aforementioned ground of play, and as Lex swung on the swings and Nimsie slid on the slide, I realised that I had unwittingly entered a battleground between the Hoves and the Hove-nots, and that I would leave questioning what it meant to be a Brightonian, and indeed, a man.

On the edges of the playground sat groups of bloated and tattooed men and women, some topless, some squeezed into Brighton & Hove Albion soccer shirts, and all cheaply slurping cheap lager from cheap cans as they paid little or no attention to the veritable child-fight-club developing by the climbing frame. (I’ve no problem with popping open an Argentinian rosé on a family picnic, but canned beer in public is surely a budget booze too far?) Amidst the sea of crew-cuts and pre-pubescent muffin-tops, Lex and his floppy fringe and Nimsie in her Charley Barley threads stood out like sore, if well-manicured and superior thumbs. A rotund Wayne Rooney-look-a-like was squaring up to my dear boy, whose Oscar Wilde-style retorts and put-downs (I was so proud) didn’t seem to be having the desired effect, while over at the see-saw, Nimsie was being prodded and poked by belly-topped girls with scraped-back hair and myriad ill-placed piercings. This was no Level playing field, but more a cultural and indeed, class killing field.

I had to do something. I just had to. So I mustered up all the justified indignation I could and I tutted and shook my head with all the gusto I could muster. The locals soon realised I meant business. “Lexmeister”, I shouted. “Nimmy-cheeks”, I called. “Come here guys. Let’s have a time out and a drink. I’ve got some yumberry juice”. As my two darlings extrapolated themselves from the proletarian throng, I myself became the victim of tattooed abuse, courtesy of a verbal assault-of-the-earth directed my way by the boozing méres et péres. The hard-to-decipher attack was peppered with the occasional “f*** off back to London” and “shove your hummus up your a***”. One member of the throng, who obviously reads the Argus online, even recognised my handsome, chiselled features. “You don’t belong here, Delahunty, you posh c***”, he bellowed.

I hastily ushered my put-upon brood to the far end of the park where we eventually re-activated our respective well-being with a short session of Bikram yoga. As we sat there in the sun, massaging our bruised egos and stretching our fragile souls and as Nimsie asked “Daddy, what’s a c***?”, I pondered what one of the “locals” had uttered - “You don’t belong here, Delahunty”. Was this urban yokel right? Did I not belong here? Was I simply a metropolitan blow-in and not a true Brightonian? And what did it mean to be a true Brightonian anyway?

As I pondered this question, I saw a poor Caucasian down-and-out (he was English, judging by the George’s cross tattooed on his forehead), vomiting a cider-filled waterfall of (mostly) liquid all over his beleaguered body, yet on the footpath nearby, a well-groomed Asian twenty-something boy and his equally well-groomed African male friend kissed and embraced like gays do. Like Brightonians do. And in that beautiful multi-cultural inter-continental homo-embrace, I realised being a Brightonian had nothing to do with how long you had lived there, or whether your family went back ten generations in Hollingdean. It was about a feeling, a vibe. Brighton may be a state of mind, but it also is a place. A place where all are welcome, no matter how educated, successful, middle class or media you are.

No I didn’t go to the Withdean every Saturday (I preferred to cheer on my friend Louis and his petanque team down by Hove Lawns), no, my father didn’t witness the Mods and Rockers' uber-romanticised camp-contretemps beside the sea and no, my grandmother didn’t run a fishing boat out of Shoreham harbour. But if you cut me open (with one of those flick-knives the locals often carry), like a stick of seaside rock, you’d find the word “Brighton” etched into my very being.

So have I and the metropolitan media hordes made Brighton a better place, I ask you? Well, I answer you “yes, yes we have”. From Laurence Olivier to Patsy Palmer (the ginger one off Eastenders) and Zoe Ball to Peter Andre (the orange bloke off Jordan and Peter Andre), it is we migrant creatives who have put the “Right On” in Brighton.

So maybe our money has forced the “locals” out to the far reaches of the city, but maybe in time, they’ll be happier there. Maybe out of their (sub)urban angst, great art will be born, like in Manchester, Compton or Beirut (The Moussaytbeh Dubstep Collective must be seen and heard to be believed).

So, good people of Whitehawk, of Moulsecoomb and of Portslade, don’t hate us. Embrace us. Embrace our independent smoothie bars, our quirky over-priced vintage clothes stores and our web design agencies. Yes, you are special. But so are we. And we love this damned crazy place just as much you. And actually we’re not that different. I don’t do all my shopping at Waitrose, you know. Sometimes I, like you, will venture into Aldi (albeit for its Euro-caché rather than it’s uber-cheap basics). But what ties us together most of all is that we live in Brighton (even if people like me do live in the nicer bits).

Therefore I urge you, the disaffected people of Brighton, to take down that Union Jack flying in your back garden or that St George’s cross nestling in the corner of your bedroom window and replace it with a rainbow flag. And salute your hometown and its all-encompassing, compassionate and well-heeled power.