Down to Sussex

Today we packed up and checked out of the wonderful London youth hostel.We would highly recommend it. Not only is the location great, but even little details were good: the shower, for example, was a real gusher, and always hot.

We walked, at about 9:00, up to St. Paul's and hailed a cab. We got a white cab, covered as many London cabs are with an advertisement: this one for Qatari airlines. But Will was disappointed that we did not get to ride in a black cab.

For our first London cab ride it was pretty unremarkable. Kate and I rode backwards on the jump seats (which have acquired seat belts since I was a kid) and Will and Galen rode in the forward-facing seats. It seemed a reversal from how it was supposed to happen. Sometimes traffic was fast and sometimes slow, but pretty soon we were at Victoria Station and paying £14.

We had two portals before us into Victoria Station (doors is too small a word to describe their size), with literally crowds of people coming and going through them. Choosing the left-hand one, we walked into a vast space roofed with scaffolding around ancient steel beams. People were everywhere: it was far more busy than the proverbial Grand Central Station in New York City. There was a constant flow in all directions the entire time we were there; trains were arriving and departing literally every few minutes, and the public address system almost never stopped making announcements. The floor of the hall is covered in shops and therefore everywhere you look (except straight up) there is advertising. It is the Islamic souk in its Western incarnation: flowers, fish & chips, books, newsagent, and colour, colour, colour. Each shop is its own building within the building. In the middle of the main hall (for we had initially walked into what was merely the east wing of the building) a woman was singing with a sound system (to raise money to fight cancer), yet amid all the action it seemed an almost futile gesture. There was a huge electronic board across the south end of the hall in which all the departing trains in the next half-hour were listed in orange letters, giving destinations and platform

Kate and the boys went to ground in a small corner next to a shop just like all the others ("Nero Coffee") while I joined a long open-air queue (anything not actually within one of the inner buildings feeling therefore outside) for the ticket windows. When I finally reached an agent, he told me through thick glass that seems, no matter how good the microphone, to make it just that much harder to communicate, that there was no 10:21 slow train to Brighton, and suggested the 10:06 express. But I had a schedule that told me there was a 10:21 slow train, and after our nauseating experience with the train from Manchester, I wanted it. He finally confessed that trains for Brighton did leave every 15 minutes. Sure enough, just after ten a train to Brighton at 10:21 was posted on the long electronic board: platform 15.

Now one of the strange things about England is that sometimes unexpectedly you find yourself in a rubbish-bin-free zone, and Victoria station is one of these. Galen had just finished an apple core, and I a rice pudding, and we therefore had some things to throw away. We sent Kate off to find a rubbish bin; she was unsuccessful. Instead of leaving these things on the floor we stubbornly set off for our platform, carrying our bags and holding the rubbish in our free fingers. Now the vast hall gave way to the actual trainsheds, but by the time we had reached the barriers where a man confirms that you have a ticket, we still had seen no rubbish barrel or bin. I asked the guy who checked our tickets, and heroically, after shaking his head, as if embarrassed himself by the lack of an obvious conveneince, and said he'd look after my rubbish himself. A prince among men.

The British have raised to a high art, by the way, the apology for things not going right. It is, interestingly, a component of almost all conversations; a departure point for humour, a necessary part of getting-to-know-you.

The train was very modern (touch-sensitive buttons beside the doors open them so you can board the train) and painted in white and green: "Southern." We found a group of 3 seats facing 3, with a little table; Will and I sat facing forward because we're the one's who get motion sickness; Kate and Galen have iron stomaches and sat facing back. The slow train (it was one) was fun: stopping at Gatwick and East Croydon, and a host of little stops as we came into Brighton. It rarely got going too fast, and when it did it didn't last too long.

And Brighton was a breath of fresh air. Even as we stepped off the train it was cooler, fresher. A strong breeze blowing from the southwest chilled and thrilled us. The station was all blue-and-white painted girders overhead: very airy and spacious, yet small enough that we did not feel lost in a spacedock. We phoned Enterprise; they picked us up; we got our car; we drove down to the seashore in the middle of downtown and parked.

The endless horizon of the sea is compelling after the big city. It was a clear blue day, and there was the sea, catching our eyes down every street until we were standing on the promenade ourselves, having crossed the last crosswalk and walked to the edge of the ramp that leads down to the sand. A few sailboats were offshore, and lots of people were below us on the ochre beach. I had not known this, but Brighton beach is not white, and it is not sand: it is a yellowy-brown colour, which is the colour of the cobbles and pebbles of which it is made. The waves breaking on it make a lovely clattering, rattling sound as millions of pebbles rustle against one another. We walked along it, the boys wading in and screaming at the cold. There were lots of people on the beach, sunbathing, lying about, eating, but we were the only ones actually interacting with the water. The whole promenade is lined with shops and restaurants tucked into the seawall, well above high tide but below the level of the street: fish & chips, oysters, scallops, fresh shell fish, post cards, sassy bumper stickers, clothing, art galleries: everything you might hope to sell or buy in what is England's iconic seaside resort. The hotels and apartment buildings fronting the sea are all creamy white and uniformly four or five stories tall, and the air smells superb. Galen and Will looked for France, but there was nothing out there but endless blue sea. It was sunny and we squinted in that special way you squint at the shore when it's windy, and Kate and I wished we could just hang out all day there, drinking a beer or a coffee, watching people and sampling seafood. At the public washrooms we paid 20p to an attendant, who seemed to be from Russia, and the facilities were very clean.

Drove on down to Newhaven, about 30 minutes along a winding beachy sort of highway. Two lanes, passing through beach community after beach community. Palm-type trees planted here and there, as if to suggest that this was somehow the Mediterranean; crests of beach grass, the shore rising up in the occasional white cliff. Everything built of yellowy brick, the road of course without any shoulder whatsoever. Many pedestrian crossings, but once out of Brighton things moved along rapidly, and soon we were descending into Newhaven and crossing the Ouse, a remarkably small river, the Swinging Bridge no longer than 20 metres perhaps, and wondering how the ferry from Dieppe could get in here. Through two roundabouts and we seemed to be skirting a vast green area filled with sea grass; suddenly Foxhole Farm was on our left, and we were driving up a small lane with the wind beating at our backs-- and we were here. Walls made of flint stones cemented together in mortar. Low ceilings.

We really liked our space age car, a black Renault Megane. It is narrow, and does three great tricks. Its key is a black plastic card, about the size of a playing card, with a few recessed buttons on it. You don't actually have to insert this key into the slot in the dash board in order to push the "Start/stop" button; it just has to be in the car. If you walk away from the car with the key in your pocket, it will beep at you, like "Hey you forgot to lock me!" When you reverse, and you're backing into a parking space with a wall or curb behind you, a beeping sound begins at perhaps a metre from the wall, and increases in frequency as you approach it, going to a solid tone when you're about 15 cm away. It'sradar or something. When you lock it, the side mirrors fold flat against the car. We feel cool in it.

Delighted to be here, we only did one more thing: we went and shopped at the giant Sainsbury's "superstore" (only two roundabouts away). Inside, we could have been in any vast supermarket in North America--except that the food packaging was all different. Which is surprisingly exciting: as if when we're eating raisin bran we're eating something we've never had before, because it;s called Sultana Bran. Dates from Tunisia; peaches from South Africa; cheddar cheese from ... Canada? Good lord. Bought all we might need, came home, ate and went to bed.