brighton makes me feel like *the* main character even though i'm not
[preface]
i’ve only been to brighton 5 times in my life. the first time to see lorde when i was 17 and performative on tumblr. the second time for a university interview. i botched it so bad they recommended a foundation course in media. i did not take it. the third time was when i was a band groupie who was photographing a small surf wave band where i’d been on one date with the bass player and given him covid prior. the fourth time was with my ex boyfriend. the trip there was fine with him, the trip back? awful. every train was cancelled. the train from brighton showed up then decided to stop and drop us at littlehampton. from there we had to take the 700 bus to chichester then take the 700 chichester bus to portsmouth and take the train from there. by the time we would have got to portsmouth we would have missed our last train back so i admitted defeat and my angel nanna got us and let us camp over at hers.
the fifth time? an absolute breeze. i managed to run into three people i knew in the past, i had to buy a tea from spoons in the morning because the hotel milk was mouldy? and i didn’t have an insane hangover. i got to show my flatmate my top two favourite tourist attractions too.
a dog in the window of a salon i’d photographed in 2023, blissfully unaware i would see this dog in the exact same spot two and half years later. he was photographed again.
the wing of the royal albion hotel i stayed in just before lockdown in 2020 which is now just a pile of rubble where it burned down. i love showing it to people and going ‘look! i stayed in this shithole once!’.
i feel like the dog was selling brighton, but then the burned down hotel? not so much. let me discuss the entirety of the brighton trip in all of her delight though and why it makes me feel like a main character.
[main bloody body of text]
it must have been about 20 minutes before we were supposed to leave the flat and head to the train station before i finally decided it was time to pack my bag. the first thing i packed? that pink 2ds with the sims 2 inserted into it. just because i’m going away overnight doesn’t mean i can forget my side hustle, being a cartoon hotel manager in strangetown, my favourite and also unnerving hotel california-esque game. we get to the station with 9 minutes to spare and the whole trip was smooth sailing. as the train rolled into ford, i told my flatmate i was annoyed i’d only brought a brownie with me because i was hungry and dying for something savoury. the family on the seats directly opposite me cracked open a bag of popcorn immediately and it really rubbed me up the wrong way with my intense savoury craving. after locating the nearest greggs from the train station, i essentially inhaled a vegan sausage roll and started to plan out what we were going to do. it’s very difficult being the type b friend, but somebody has to do it.
the plan of the night? fuck around and find out. we got some snacks in for the end of the night. but were left confused when we realised that sainsburys local didn’t have an alcohol license. we scampered down to the co-op. there were nearly tears in my eyes when the bloke who had to be 5 years younger than me challenged my age. the shop security looked about 14 years old. no facial hair. about 5’8. i couldn’t get my head around who had hired him. he looked about as useless as i’d imagine myself to be if i ever decided becoming a bouncer was the move for me. the first pub we stepped in was divine. i’d read the menu before we left the hotel and had decided on the main meal and the pint i would be consuming. clearly everyone else had the same idea because it was packed to the brim other than a couple of tables out the front. damp from the downpour an hour before. the streetlight reflecting on the ash tray, covered with wet piles of old cigarettes.
truth be told, we ended up in a zizzi. there’s nothing wrong with a zizzi perse, and we did get to sit in the romantic dim corner overlooking one of the back lanes filled with fancy yet performative looking pubs that were probably full of men in brimless caps drinking burnt tire ipa and women wearing baggy jeans with a pair of new balances that even dr house would be proud to own. in zizzi i got myself a large pinot and a chilli prawn spiedini, not expecting the bloody prawns to come out like a kebab hovering over the plate. it felt a bit dramatic. i was slightly embarrassed. i was asking my flatmate what on earth i was supposed to do with the prawns dangling over my pasta so menacingly. we got there in the end so it’s okay.
next stop was to see haim at the brighton centre. seeing them was actually the key point of why i was here to begin with, but for some reason i haven’t mentioned that yet so here it is. i came here to see haim. i have to admit, i felt like i didn’t know their music enough to warrant going, but at the same time their debut album went platinum in my ears when i was 14 years old and that felt like a good enough reason to go and see them live. plus there was the bonus of them playing in brighton which just felt correct in my mind.
‘shall i drink 500 beers tonight?’ alana [baby haim] screamed out to the crowd, the room filling with cheers and what almost felt like canned laughter. the more she spoke, the more i saw myself in her. it’s like when you watch a movie or a tv show and you kind of become hyper fixated on a character. except this was a real person. hearing the corny humour, comments about beer and her energy. it really was like watching myself, but if i wasn’t in my own body. as if i was trapped in someone else’s body. i couldn’t look away. i too wanted 500 beers after the show. when the lights went up after the show i looked at my flatmate. ‘shall we go get a pint of stella?’, gone like the wind. we were out of the concert hall.
[just a note the concert was amazing by the way. the three sisters have incredible stage presence and high energy the whole time. i loved it. i felt like i was watching a coming of age movie, but in a cool way. not a performative way. i feel like i’ve been describing everything as performative since i stepped foot into brighton. i’m not even there anymore.]
it was gutting and heart wrenching when i found out that walkabout had been closed in brighton and was in the process of being refurbished into a barbara’s. even more heart wrenching to learn that barbara’s wasn’t even open to the public yet. so what was the plan? it started off as a quiet two pints of stella in spoons, but turned into a quiet pint and fucking hell neck that wife beater because this pub is actually going to close half an hour early. perhaps i even felt the buzz on my way to the next bar which turned out to be a 1 minute walk. it was also open until 2am. this may have been the lamest bar crawl we’ve ever done in our lives, but it’s fine because the second bar was a hoot. a vinyl themed bar where the 24 year old bartender is playing 2011 justin bieber from his spotify playlist on a big bluetooth speaker. perhaps that was the peak performative moment of the night.
i had two and a half pints of red stripe. which is odd because i’m not even a big fan of red stripe, but it just felt like the correct pint to consume in brighton. bonus points for my second pint of red stripe which i requested to have in an amstel glass. i sipped my pint and a bald 40 year old man came in where he tripped on the string of christmas lights hung up on the wall, tripping the whole thing and leaving us sat in the back in almost complete darkness. it meant something. i’m not exactly sure what it meant, but it was something.
after heading back to the hotel and finding an episode of that gordon ramsey show where he’s fixing hotels on terrestrial tv, we fell into a deep slumber ready to explore the city in full during the day.
the start of the day was abysmal. my tea was brewing and i put the milk in my tea watching it separate and realising that despite the label saying it was in date, it most definitely wasn’t. i ate the other half of the now four day old brownie for breakfast and thanked my lucky stars for buying a bottle of water to bring back to the hotel the night before.
i walked the wrong way around the lanes about 5 times. maybe that’s my own fault for trying to rely on snapchat maps to show me where i was going. i told my flatmate about the garden cafe and how it would be great for lunch, then shortly told them about how i was so hungover last time i ate there that i don’t think i ate half my breakfast and i also blew up the toilet. i personally think i did a great job of selling the cafe to them. i mean we still went, i just decided it probably wasn’t best for me to eat that same dish from two years ago. this time i settled for the salmon sandwich. salmon, cream cheese, lettuce and TWO fried eggs on the tastiest sourdough i’ve ever had. it was quite something. i forgot about the cream cheese being in the sandwich so it was an absolute delight when i just bit into cream cheese with nothing else.
after that we headed to the lanes, i once again took my flatmate the wrong way and we ended up doing the longest u-turn on planet earth. i witnessed three different taxidermies in one shop alone. i still couldn’t tell you if i was horrified or not, i couldn’t look away from them though. i even took pictures of a couple of them, i thought about posting them to my instagram photo dump and then i shied away from that idea. what would my mother think about that after all? [the first photo from the photo dump is haim performing with the word fuck in the lights, block caps]. we went into a pub where we watched the pub cat sit in front of the owners ipad every time she tried to sort the order for the pub. a real diva if you ask me. we went into an aliexpress dropship store where they sold variations of baby tees that all had things such as ‘pornnstar’ ‘i am actually insane’ and ‘future milf’ all scrawled across them in horrible text that would have been cool if omighty sold it 12 years ago.
i bought a book i’d never heard of. perhaps out of spite when my flatmate told me that the girl smoking on the cover resembled gracie abrams. i bought a poster which may or may not be ai slop, i stood in the shop staring at every limb of the lady in the poster and every part of the text on the poster before deciding to get it anyway. the poster is quite diabolical actually. it reads ‘there are only two things a man can’t resist… a pint of guinness and another pint!’. it was so rotten it felt like a must have to be on display in the flat. not that it’s up yet, but when it is, i’ll be sure to throw a flat party so everyone can commemorate.
as the sun set, i took my flatmate further out. i wanted to show them the hotel i stayed in years ago. i wanted to show them the proper british pub on that road that had a full blown thai restaurant in it where the food was served on pink asda plates [it’s called the royal sovereign if anyone is interested in eating there], the genting casino residing a two minute walk from the hotel and the accidental appearance of the pretty dog in the salon window that i had forgotten about until we made eye contact again and i screamed in the middle of the road like a crazed fan. we had one last final stop before the train.
the stinky meal deal.
as we made our way up the road hoping we would finally locate a tesco, we were stopped by a lady.
‘do you have any idea where the clock is here?’
honestly fuck knows, i hadn’t even thought about the clock despite it being a very central object for brighton. and i felt like cynthia erivo in that one wicked promo interview where she’s like ‘i didn’t know that was happening’ when i responded to her.
‘that is such a good question. i don’t actually live here,,,, but i’ve just walked away from the centre and you’re heading in the right direction if that’s any use.’ i had no idea if i had just lied to her face or not because i’d just come from the seafront. i didn’t have a scooby. i’ll tell you what though, i headed that way after lying to her face just to find out i didn’t blooming lie. i walked straight ahead and you’ll never guess what was there? that blinking clock tower.
[the stinky train meal deal]
my heart smashed into a million tiny pieces when i walked into tesco to find they did not sell the juneberry red bull. but i settled for a sprite instead. but are you ready for the stinkiest meal deal?
the prawn mayo sandwich. in my humble opinion i don’t think it smells that bad, it can’t be as pungent as cracking open a tuna and cucumber sandwich surely?? even though i have cracked open one of them on a train before too.
cucumber sticks with sour cream and chive dip. if i had simply just had the cucumber without peeling open the dip i would have been safe, but as soon as i started dipping on the train someone glared at me as if i’d killed their first child. it was fair enough, but it was delicious and i’d do it again in a heartbeat.
red leicester flavoured quavers. i’m going to be honest, i didn’t think the stink factor through on these bad boys. i just got so excited because it was a new flavour and i wanted to try them so bad. oh boy, the looks i got on the train. worse than taking your shoes off and unleashing that one diabolical cheesy sock smell. they were bloody tasty though and i also slowly nibbled on them for over an hour so i probably stank the whole train carriage out. i think it was worth it though.
next time i take a long train trip somewhere, someone remind me to bring a sandwich and accompanying snacks that are even stinkier.
(this has been directly cut and pasted from my substack so please follow the link if you wanna check it out on there and read more of my stuff)
