Sentimental Journey Part 1.

I’m in a theatre bar in Brighton, called The Colonnade. Everything is red velvet and chintz, tainted mirrors and spotlight photos of the great and good who have trod the boards of the adjourning theatre adorn every wall, luminaries such as Gabrielle Drake, Robert Gillespie, Michael Sharvell-Martin (whom I’m particularly pleased to have spotted: he was the neighbour who drank home-brew in a shed with William Gaunt in “There’s No Place Like Home”. Gaunt is also here but you sort of expect him – maybe there was a production of “When Did You Last See Your Trousers” on and Gaunty got his old mucker in.

Four immaculately groomed young men shimmer into the bar and immediately starting talking about seeing Elton John’s last tour and trying on each other’s ponchos. So this is Brighton.

The bar maid’s hairdresser breeds seahorses in his basement.

I’m on a sentimental journey. Or in the throes of a midlife crisis. Or on the horns of a dilemma. Or on safari to stay. I’ve returned to Portslade by Sea where I spent the first thirteen years of my life (not counting the brief period where I was being born in London)

I’m starting in Brighton though – I’m not mad.

Our hotel is in Regent’s Square, one of those imposing white colonnades that sidle up the Brighton coast like horse-shoe crabs. Georgian shabby chic: picture perfect with a crumbling glaze.  There is a central reservation that has been converted, practically invisibly, into an underground car park. At the end of the road, staring out to sea, his fist raised in defiance is a big bronze sailor on a plinth, the embodiment of the British navies and as it says on the plinth “Our First Defence”. Of course, they’ve built a wind-farm there now which lends him an unintended Quixotic quality: tilting at wind-farms.

The hotel has a small beautifully turned out breakfast room full of silent women eating on their own. If I were Alan Bennett or Muriel Sparke I could probably get a novel out of this. It is unrealistically English – a pall of uptight silence falls over the room, challenged only by the grinding of recalcitrant organic muesli, chewed a joyless but sensible 36 times. One woman briefly complains about the “hardness” of her pineapple but immediately apologises for complaining. The worst thing you can do here is make a fuss.  You can hear a pin drop, although no one would be frivolous enough to drop a perfectly good pin here. I love it. Susie and I are Withnail and I here, livening up the old stiffs with our raucous chat about Alan Bennett and the shipping forecast. When we go back for a second glass of grapefruit juice there are scandalised intakes of breath.