I’m not usually interested in fridge magnets, but the tourist shops have had some pretty good ones in this year. My favourites are the plastic lobsters with claws on springs that waggle alarmingly every time the toy crustacean is moved. I’ve bought a couple for friends and, with Christmas now approaching (you can tell, the Halloween shop displays are coming down already) I thought I’d better buy a few more just in case. You never know when you might need a present at a moment’s notice and I like them so everyone else should too…

Anyway, so I go into the shop down by the Madeira café to look for lobsters but it seems I’m too late; they’ve all gone. However, I’m thinking there might still be a couple left in a cupboard somewhere, so, I go up to the lady behind the counter and ask, and she has a bit or a root around in her drawers, but comes up from behind the counter to tell me:

“I’m sorry dear, all I can give you is crabs.”

Catching the expression on my face, hers dropped too, and at some speed she started saying:

“Oh dear, oh no, oh my…”

Well, we did have a laugh about it, I mean this is the seaside isn’t it, and now whenever we see each other she winks at me.

It’s true: the old ones really are the best.

“A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others brush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”

Thomas Mann, ‘Death in Venice’

At the café there are eight men mending a bicycle. Or rather, one man mending a bicycle while the other seven offer advice and make approving and expert sounds. Meanwhile, another four or five of us sit watching the other eight, and occasionally throwing a ball for Paddy the dog. Paddy is very happy, where else does a dog get this much attention from so many potential ball-hurlers? She likes burying the ball in the sand, but then always ends up losing it so someone has to go and dig it up for her. This is considered charming, however all of us agree she’s pushing it a bit when, the ball having just been thrown, she stands staring at it lying forlorn outside the music bar until someone else picks it up and brings it back to her.
The conversation turns to living in Brighton.
“Were any of you born here?”
“No?”
“What about you?”
“Oh no, not me”
“Then how did all of us end up in Brighton of all places?
“Did anyone plan to end up here?”
“How did you get here then?”
“It sort of just happened… I can’t even remember when, or why.”
“ I’m suspicious of anyone who ends up where they planned to be.”
“Yes, people like that are weird”
“I don’t like them”
“No”
“But why are we still here?”
“Because you’re unlikely to have this kind of conversation anywhere else”
“Ah, maybe”
Michael gets up at this point and says:
“Right, I’m off”
“You going into town”
“No”
“Where you going then?”
“I’m off to push the button”
“What do you want to do that for?”
“Well someone’s got to do it, all those other buggers keep saying they won’t.”

I have to say I wasn’t impressed when I first heard him singing. Not bad on the Ukulele but a rather thin voice that gabbled out lyrics so fast none of them really stuck the way proper songs are supposed to. I’d walked past him several times, but today I suddenly realised that the subject of his songs was not the usual declamations of love, loss, or some other poetic truth, the way lyrics usually try to be, but instead his lines directly related to the world in front of him as it passed by. I could hear couplets relating to the girl in the smurf sweatshirt I’d just seen, or the kid who’d dropped his ice cream, or the woman with the three poodles, or… he was making it up as quickly as the world went past him! No wonder he had to sing it all so fast. And not only that, but it all rhymed too. And suddenly there I was in it: “The man with the camera’s stopped and he’s watching me. I know he’ll take a picture and that’s all fiiine, I don’t miiiiinddd…” or something like that, but better.

I‘ve spent the past year trying to record all those small moments I’ve stumbled upon as I walk around town every day. Now, here was someone trying to sing them, all. It was like an auditory equivalent of looking at a camera obscura. Everything was there as it passed, the oddest details coming to focus and then disappearing, only to be replaced by something else as it happened along; all one long song about everything.

I had to take his picture didn’t I? We stopped and talked, introduced ourselves, talked a bit about what each of us were doing. He’s just set up a website, gave me the address, and I can’t believe that by the time I’d got home I’d lost it. If anyone reading this comes across him, do write it down and let me know what it is.

The man in the puffer jacket sits next to me on a bench and begins to tell me his story. “I come to Brighton, I am capocuoco; capocuoco, you understand? No, er, cucina? Yes. Very good pizza, thirty years make pizza, I come to England from Torino, very big city but bad for work, politico not good, you understand? Er, Mafia, everywhere, hard for work so I come to England, yes Mafia here too but in Italy… impossibile… Live in Italy many years but I am, er, er, Egitto, you understand? Pharaonico, Yes? But Christian Pharaonico (he touches his chest three times) many years from home.”
–
Meanwhile, on the station concourse, who should I see but Carmina Smith, one of MI5’s less than secret operatives. You can tell it’s her by the way she stands, legs crossed unfeasibly and nose buried in a book (she’s an avid reader, of anything). To all outward appearances completely self-absorbed, if fact she’s already clocked a senior member of one of the triad gangs, who is beginning to move in for the kill. Carmina Smith is less than secret for this very reason: knowing who she is, gangsters are drawn to her like moths to a flame. How can she be so brazen, so gauche? Nothing will happen on the station forecourt, neither will wish to draw attention as this creates complications. Later on though, perhaps in a quiet spot behind one of the broken ticket machines, the gangster will find her once again in similar pose, nose still buried in some infernal small-business publication. Here he will make his play and Carmina will then release like an over-wound spring. In one single, deadly pirouette, the whiplash from her titanium tipped court shoe will reduce the hapless criminal to a quivering mass of sinew and blubber, ready to be dispatched to headquarters for interrogation.

“Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world”

Arthur Schopenhauer

Every year one of the main political parties holds its conference in Brighton. This autumn it’s the turn of the Labour party. Regardless of political affiliation, these events are an unparalleled opportunity to observe men of all ranks, from ministers to media hounds, wearing suits and striding purposefully along the promenade.

And I know that in the minds of every last one of them lurks that spectre, the cameraman’s hunger and the politician’s dread, of Neil Kinnock’s upset with the sea on that cold September afternoon of 1983. This might explain why, ever since then, you don’t see any of them any closer to the waves than the cafés on the lower path.

And this is the widescreen version… This set of photographs run parallel with those presented in my previous post, rather than as a continuation of it. I’m curious as to whether changing the format in any way alters the narrative?

Anyway…

On the other hand, while the tourist season is nearly over, the student migration is almost upon us: more than 35,000 of them arriving next weekend. Bars and clubs formerly filled to overflowing with hen parties and stag do’s, will find their populations replaced with would-be hipsters and existentialists, computer nerds, trainee doctors nurses and pharmacists… all sampling the delights of fresher’s week in the sure knowledge that for the first time they can get as drunk as the like without their parents finding out. There will be carnage. There always is.

The long-range forecast is for a blazingly hot October, but everyone knows you can’t predict the weather even three days ahead, and tomorrow we are promised a deluge. Further fuelled by the knowledge that the autumn really is upon us, there’s a sense of triumphal urgency to the activities of today’s day-trippers, whether it be in tackling ice creams and plates of chips (while fighting off the seagulls) looking at souvenirs, going on fairground rides, or just walking up and down staring at things. We are the lucky ones; if you aren’t here today you might have missed the party.

I’m no different. Knowing full well that when the weather goes, so will they, I’ve spent all day outside, trying to squeeze the last pips out of the summer (while simultaneously hoping the long range forecast is true). As a result of which I’ve ended up with enough photographs for two contact strips.

Ok, I could have combined them into one big one, but for a change I’ve decided to post two in different formats. This one is in 4×3 ratio, the next one will be exclusively wide-screen…

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.
And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.
Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;
Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;
Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

Paul, Corinthians 13,
(King James Version)