Brighton and Hove, in Albion.

 

We're traveling light. The airline has produced a series of gouging exercises: anything larger than a tote bag is now subject to eye-watering charges. They enforce this vigorously in the check in queue, a member of staff hovering with a card machine and an air grim pragmatism, ready to charge those unlucky enough not to fit the minuscule slot. It's like Cinderella's glass slipper, a fairy tale start to your holiday. This makes a mockery of the "speedy boarding" dodge, as it takes three times as long to board, especially as the sort of people who pay for speedy boarding are also exactly the sort of people who over-pack. Fore-armed, Susan and I glide past the woman with the hungry slot. Slightly more alarmingly we're also ignored by customs who don't look at our boarding passes or passports, they just ask me my surname and wave me on. No one looks at us as we board the plane either. Clearly we have no edge. Perhaps my new teeth have launched a charm offensive independently of me. They are my bona fides. Velvet ropes are lifted wherever I go. Scrapes are scraped and curtsies curtsied. 

Grizzling child on the plane count: Two, one two rows in front, one two rows behind us. Stereo. 

Brighton is a libertarian dystopia. Everyone here is an individual, in aggressive zero sum competition with all the other individuals. It's all drama, all the time: explosive, don't-fuck-with-me, performative theatrics. Theatre that is all epiphenomenon: the centre cannot hold because there is no centre, it's all expulsion, a succession of big bangs going off on the undulating pavements. I feel about Brighton what I feel about almost everywhere: this place would be great without any people in it. Come friendly bombs and fall on everyone but me. The Omega Man is my ultimate fantasy, really. Walking about, unbothered by the encroaching, inexplicable madness of strangers. I watched a man with long hair, a vest and a beanie hat sweep out of Tescos, knocking produce off the shelves as he did so, and weave down the street where he got aggressively in the face of all the women and tourists he met, while avoiding anyone he thought might punch him in the face. Anyone as big as him. A kind of selective mania, then. He was, of course, talking to himself, loudly and full of unimaginative invective. People involved in one sided arguments thrive in Brighton, the popularity of hands-free devices only confusing matters further. But I'm fairly certain the blonde boy with clenched fists and hollow eyes who was bellowing "HE KNOWS WHAT HE CAN DO, HE CAN LICK MY ARSE IS WHAT HE CAN DO!" while pounding furiously down the Hove Road wasn't waiting for a rebuttal. 

No pun intended. 

This is a dirty, cracked, patchwork town, full of hills and troughs, exploded pavements, brittle as papadum. Seagulls and pigeons nod and peck everywhere, over the bodies of the tandoori coloured homeless, snoozing through an endless siesta. Tattooed, toothless drink and drug addicts, strike poses. They bray and shriek. Their relationships are internecine, unfathomable at least to me, as I walk past. Everyone is tattooed, everyone is pierced, everyone is loud, except Susan and I, both obvious grockles.

 My face also marks me out as a tourist. It's bright red. It didn't seem that hot at first. There was a refreshing sea breeze as we strolled through the lanes behind the second Roman invasion - all the tourists were Italians for some reason. Even the train from Heathrow was packed full of Italian students. But by the time we actually booked into the hotel the damage had been done. My face was the colour of a cricket ball, throbbing and hot like an impatient cock. I've put on Factor Fifty every day, but the heat shimmer coming from my scarlet spam is like vaseline over the camera lens. Everyone but me looks so young. A large spot appeared on my lip and burst into a keyhole shaped pool of blood as I towel dried the Martian landscape of my head. The hole is mostly hidden by the white scrub of my beard, though pinking delicately about the exit wound. Safe to say I'm not looking my best. Susan has coloured beautifully. The only sunburn she has is a neat heart shaped red mark on her chest. Even her sunburn is cool. She's so together. 

I love Brighton. That might not be clear. I love it FOR its squalor, for the glamour that hasn't so much faded as been scribbled out of existence. Its pavements are ruptures, strewn with bodies, its houses enormous. How does anyone afford to live here? Behind those endless wrought iron balconies, in those swollen Georgian mansions. But it looks wonderful. Ailing, propped up - the entire town is held in place with scaffolding - each building braced and girdled with steel. I love Portslade. I grew up there. In essence it hasn't really changed in 50 years. Well the shops have. But the geography is the same. And I didn't go to the shops when I lived here. There was an ice cream shop near the sea front presided over by a man in a white coat who looked like John Christie. There was a proto-supermarket called "Shopper's Paradise". Towards our house was a shop where my mum stood up for herself when a shop keeper accused one of her kids of breaking a mirror by accident. I heard that story a lot - she was very proud of herself. 

People in Brighton are LOUD. I was unprepared for the loudness, the cockneyness of Brightonians. I might have had that voice had I not trained myself out of it at twelve. Or if I'd stayed here. I often wonder what would have happened if I'd have stayed in Brighton. I'd probably be dead. There's lots to do compared with Basingstoke. I might have found more deadly channels to explore than going to both Our Prices and then onto the Busker's coffee bar every Saturday for three years. Thanks Basingstoke.     

I bought my first tote bag. I bought two t-shirts and two badges. Apart from that the only thing I've bought has been booze and food. And factor fifty sun cream*. My tote bag features a Medieval wood-cut of jolly skeletons dancing out of the grave, rendered in a necrotic green. 

 On the second morning of the holiday, I woke and blearily checked my phone, to find I had been offered a publishing contract for my first novel. There is no better way to start a holiday, or a day, or the rest of my life, quite frankly. It is no more or less than a longed for dream come true. 

It was a long e-mail, and I skimmed it - saw the word "unfortunately" - blaring, neon - and assumed it was a brush off. Nevertheless I returned to the beginning, reading it properly and with mounting disbelief. They loved the manuscript. LOVED IT. The publisher told me he mostly read it in a library and was embarrassed by how often he'd had to laugh out loud. HAD TO, is the clincher here. It is a comedy, so unanswerable laughter is key. I read the e-mail to Susan, my voice high and girlish, as it is when suffused with glee, and her hands clasped in front of her, her smile beaming, the light in her beautiful eyes. She radiated joy. It was a good start to the holiday. 

My publisher is American. My career appears to be happening in America, a country I have never been to. I've been to Canada and Colombia, but never that divisive bit in the middle. I might have to go. I've always got on well with Americans. 

I'm writing this in my favourite pub in Brighton The Heart and Hand. It has green tiles, stained glass and two very lazy cats. It also has a great Juke Box and an aggressive table-service-only policy, which is both unnecessary and grudgingly, passive-aggressively enforced. Outside are the random screams. The soundtrack to Brighton is seagulls, roadworks and phantom cries. 

The bar owner has just killed a mosquito with a tennis racket. "Who needs entertainment when we've got you two?" says one of the locals. It's meant as and received as a compliment. 

On the first full day of the holiday we walked to Portslade, where I grew up. I had my photo taken outside the Portslade Library, where I first fell in love with books - we had few in the house - on the day I had confirmation my first novel would be published. We couldn't actually go into the library because you now need a pin number to enter the building. This goes against everything a library is for, surely? It is no doubt to do with money and, or, the Tory government, who would really rather prefer it if you didn't read, actually. 

Most Brighton thing: seeing a ridiculous black and red Batmobile with the license plate "EU3ANK" getting a parking ticket outside the Sealife Centre. 

On the Tuesday we walked about fifteen miles. The following day, a mere seven. A holiday with me is like boot-camp. In camp boots. 

We went to Rottingdean. I'd long wanted to go there for a number of reasons. Firstly, when I was getting the train from from Portslade to Hove to go to school, there were a long list of strange names listed over the station P.A., the most evocative being Rottingdean. It has the word "rotting" in it. It is, perversely, a very beautiful little village. 

The second reason I wanted to go there was because I was aware of a wishing stone, a peculiar grotesque, inlaid in the wall of Rudyard Kipling's house. I'm not a huge fan of Kipling - "Puck of Pook's Hill" aside - but he has left a beautiful garden where Susan and I spent a moment of beautiful breathable peace. 

This is what I want from a holiday: long walks, the past, and a few seconds of quiet together. The final reason I wanted to come here was to see if I could find the inspiration for "The Local Shop" from "The League of Gentlemen". Famously the shop sold fossils and Gatiss had been a fossil collector from childhood, but he was profoundly offended by the proprietor of the shop, disturbed by young people, possibly Northern young people, puncturing the sanctity of her sacred space. I'm not sure I found the proper shop - there is no plaque - and this was a good thirty years ago. Little shops with bad attitudes and elderly owners don't tend to stick around. I took a few pictures of likely contenders, 

But this is really a pilgrimage to The League of Gentlemen, a defining part of my cultural history. The importance of The League and its diaspora cant be understated. They've annexed a vast cultural terrain over half my lifetime: The League, Dr Who, Psychoville, Dracula, a Ghost Story At Christmas, Inside No 9, Ghost Stories, Sherlock, even digging out the short stories of Robert Aickman. They've done all the things I wanted to do, they've mapped the territory. And while I sometimes wish they'd give it a rest and give someone else a go, I've been grateful for the phenomenal work and that in mining a narrow cultural, associative seam, revealing there is an audience for it. They're counter-intuitive. In a world where you're told you can't be clever, you cant marry humour, horror and pathos, where you can't have subtlety and the grotesque frotting against each other, they say "Well, you can, because here it is!" Pronouncing "because" "becoss", because they're still bloody-minded Northerners. And they're older than me still, which is a dying art.  

The Olde Black Horse in Rottingdean is a dream of a pub. A sleepy, empty beer garden, hazy with the song of birds. The white walls latticed with long, purple shadows. Our breathing becomes slow and  deliberate, as we drink in the soft blue of the afternoon. The other pub - where we ate because, in a bid to ape the licensing laws of my childhood, the Black Horse shuts at three for two hours - was fine. The food better than ordinary pub grub. The service quick and polite. But the pub stank of piss. Warm urea permeated the entire building, like the worst Glade Plug In you could imagine, filtering through like a sour sirocco. Behind us, while we ate, the manager and the sockless rep from the brewery, chatted strategy. Maybe the bar could be extended? Change the menu, perhaps? What about Karaoke or a Meat Raffle? One thing they never mentioned was sorting out the permeating reek of urine, which hung like a yellow mist while I took the cutlery to their beefburger. After a pint, I braced myself and went to the toilet. I took a breath before I entered, as you would attempting to navigate the facilities at a festival. So fresh! So clean! So delightful! The toilets were fragrant. It was the pub that stank.  

We headed back to The Black Horse, which was like drinking in a day dream of the Chelsea Flower Show, but without pensioners talking about their feet. We closed our eyes, we held hands, we breathed. 

On Wednesday the spot on my lip returned. As the day continued it gathered resources, solidifying into a small, pallid fried egg. That night, as I scrubbed off the day's Factor Fifty, marveling at the scabby puce of my forehead - the lace of an altar boy's surplice slung carelessly over a blood red cassock - the spot fell, audibly, onto the sink. I wadded the top lip with toilet paper until the blood stopped gushing, and went to bed. On Thursday it was fine all day. In the evening we went to Petit Pois for dinner and, in my Matelot sweater and newly purchased sunglasses, I was almost good-looking. We had a great meal and a good time. 

I woke up on the Friday morning to distortion. To caricature. To the brush of Francis Bacon. My lip had gestated in the night. I had a Billy Idol's whiplash smile without requesting such a thing. I asked Susan to look at it as I couldn't face it. 

"Yes," she said with the sang froid of the medical professional she is, "it is a bit swollen." Her eyes were saying something different. They were saying "Hmm. My already burnt and boiled boyfriend is now seriously deformed. What's the easiest way I can get away from this creature which, really, really should be finished off with a wheel brace as an act of kindness."

I washed my face. I brushed my teeth. I applied the factor fifty to the rugged islands between serene lagoons that were now features of my forehead, and I did all this without once looking at my face. This had happened before. I'd gone to see my mum in Basingstoke. I'd looked and felt normal boarding the plane, but by the time I'd alighted the train at Basingstoke station my lip had ballooned to Joseph Merrick proportions and, instead of my mother being my first port of call, I checked in with Boots the Chemist for some anti-herpes medicine. I couldn't even kiss my mother for fear of goring her. And here I was again, off a side-street behind Churchill Square, dabbing cream onto a lip like a partially inflated dinghy. 

I won't survive on a desert island. I know that. After four days in Brighton I was burnt, blistered, chunks of my forehead were breaking off like polar ice caps and my mouth was distended and warped, an equatorial toad in full sexual display. 

One thing was clear: another day of holiday and I would be dead.       

Relax girls, he's worried. 

*I bought Susan a top, now I think of it. And a copy if "The London Nobody Knows" (First Edition).