So, I'm doing the 6.000 steps a day, sometimes in the city where I used to live and sometimes down the road, in the place where I live now. Ach, the city is Br1ghton, the town in W0rthing, named recently by A Murray as the dullest place imaginable. I hate it here. I really fucking hate it. But I'm not sure if that's a real feeling, which should be acknowledged and respected, or just a convenient place to vent all my anger and loss and stuff about ED, so that if I found a way of returning to the city I love, I'd just be angry about something else so I might as well just stay and be angry here and save all the upheaval. How are you meant to tell the difference?

Anyway, while I walked today, here, in the cold, bright sunlight along the path by the beach, I found myself hating it more and more and I'm still not sure where to go with it, so I'm writing it out. Probably more than once. As things occur to me.

I mean, I don't have a huge amount of friends in the city, I'm mostly mooching about alone, so it's other things. Most apparent is the people - who they are, how they look and the probable reasoning behind their choice of style and presentation. Brighton isn't all that diverse, not like London, but here today I only saw people who were 99.99% straight, white, middle class, aged between 30 and 110, and all dressed to not draw attention to themselves. They took no notice of me as I was in my gruesome beige duvet coat, blending in like a motherfucker, but I have been given Looks on other occasions, in other outfits. I never get Looks in Br1ghton, not even looks, no one gives a fuck there. The place is heaving with art students, drag queens and drama queens of all ages, races and sexualities, and tiny theatre companies and god knows who else - you have to make a bit of bloody effort to stand out there, which I don't, I just wear what feels right at the time, as do loads of other people, and I stopped noticing it when I lived there, but now, fucking hell, it's beige-topia here, and I realise I NEED the rich visual landscape provided by all those show-offs and the (more numerous) vaguely not quite dull, like me, because there's nothing to look at here.

I mean, who cares? I go to Br1ghton a lot, so why does it matter? Does it matter?

I remember when I was teaching here, the over-riding impression from the kids and their parents that there was only one way to be and to do anything, the right way, and if you did it differently that was because you were either stupid or a cunt, or just asking for a smack in the mouth.

Sigh.

I took pictures:


Beach huts:



From a distance I thought this had been yarn bombed, but it was lots of plastic trays:



Photo-a-day topic 'in the hand' so stick in hand:



and lines in my hand. A palmist took one look, decades ago, and said, fuck, you'll never be bored, and I haven't been and I do seem to have more lines than other people, but if you're a palmist don't tell me what you can see because I don't want to know:



I am grateful for: having a wee toke on my pipe and not getting too stoned and not craving a fag; refinding the ability to witter on about nothing much, which I like to think of as my specialist subject; having a link to Jarvis Cocker's 2 hour radio programme about Bowie, here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06whnv6#play - may not work; making it through another hard day; but doing art with YD this afternoon, which was nice, so not all hard, must remember that.

Laters xxx