Just over a week ago Suzi and I were only 50 miles from Brighton, in a riverbank London jazz club listening to Alan Price, musician and raconteur. We could have given the gig a miss and within an hour been strolling to the Pier and walking down innumerable memory lanes. But we can’t. A Brighton-based Scottish ex-pat might say to us, ‘Haste ye back’, yet when we left the city in the summer of 2006 we were like those migrants from the Highlands who a century or two ago sailed to America, knowing they’d never see their wee bit hill and glen ever again.

The fact is, in our year with you we hadn’t just been trying to do ‘things’ once, we were doing ‘Brighton’ once.

But can we hold out? We don’t have an ocean between us and Palmeira Square, the Meeting Place, the race track and dog track. We’ve our health and the train fare and it’s possible that we might yield to temptation and sneak in a wee visit. (If we do, I think I’ll have to come in disguise – but not as Sean Connery.) A solution of sorts is to see Brighton but not enter it. A pleasure craft or helicopter would do nicely - and from the Channel or up in the air it wouldn’t matter what I looked like! The ideal viewing-point though is on land. Lancing beach will forever in my mind be bathed in brilliant sunshine, and even now, in my imagination, there, low on the shore, Brighton, the dazzling jewel, is only a few miles away. We could emigrate to Lancing, and spend all our sunny afternoons on deck chairs, feeling the warm sand in our feet and looking east - and reminiscing. It would be fun and torture at the same time - especially when we saw the 700 bus and knowing we couldn’t get on it.

That kind of agony and ecstasy is with us everywhere. A couple of nights back we saw on TV two outdoor ads - and two tantalising glimpses of…? You guessed right. Recently we switched on Poirot, and where was he? Domiciled near, and then mincing around, the Peace Statue. The other day in Edinburgh we bumped into a total stranger and talked about Brighton, where the guy has four properties. It’s as if we’ve never been away.

So why do I also do this? Why do I write the blog? Quite simply, in the two-horse race it’s ‘ecstasy’ that always comes out on top, even if it’s only by a short-head. But if we can’t come back to Brighton, there are other resorts with sea and strand. Perhaps that’s the solution: if I don’t have time to do things twice, then I should go elsewhere. It’s June, the sky is grey and the rain is torrential. I’m thinking of The Bull’s Head. It looks as if Alan was right: We gotta get out of this place!

(The next post is about a ‘smashing’ evening we had in Kemp Town. The first post, Arrival!, went up on May 17.)

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Readers who submit articles must agree to our terms of use. The content is the sole responsibility of the contributor and is unmoderated. But we will react if anything that breaks the rules comes to our attention. If you wish to complain about this article, contact us here