Home not home

I've fallen in love with Brighton all over again. Wandering through the lanes, I can't help but feel that I'm discovering it for the first time. Tiny alleyways with brass street signs mounted on irregular stony corners, shopfronts that totter twenty meters above the crowded pavement, comical architecture that loops and swirls and dances around brick and stone and glass - the buildings a mashing of characters as much as colours. There's a store for vegan shoes and one for glass baubles and one for handmade clocks. Any trinket that jingles or knick-knack that serves some obscure and mostly irrelevant purpose, you can find it; a kaleidoscope of creativity and a melting pot of the tanned, the tattooed, the pierced, the rocking and rolling. See the middle aged ravers buying their dubstep tracks on vinyl, the ageing hippies playing bongoes in the back of their new-age boudoirs, the angst-ridden teenagers who stew in skinny jeans at fountains and coffee clubs. It's uncharacteristically hot here, 28 degrees or more, and it somehow quickens the tempo of the place, as paunchy, balding men roll around in sweaty lunchtime haunts, and teenagers remove as many layers of clothing as humanly possibly without eschewing their top layer of skin. Perched on a balcony decorated with flags, drinking iced coffee and gazing down at the sea of bodies in leather, suede and silk, it's almost like a carnival. Down at the beach, the pasty masses gleefully line up with their towels in rows on the pebbles, hobbling to the water and back, their cool English aplomb abandoned in a crumpled pile with their shorts and sunglasses (you can later see the repercussions of this reckless abandon as half the population look like they've been spit roasted).

It's funny, I don't feel like I've lived here before. I feel like a tourist, taking photos on my phone and gawking at letterboxes, but then feeling against my fingers the cool metal of my very own house key, drinking cider at the beach with old friends and sliding straight back into my old queenly english accent (the only survivors of Aus are 'pants', 'thongs' and 'chips') - well... it feels like slipping into step with an old friend.