Benefit Street, Brighton.

  ....in the beginning.                                               I came to England directly from China where I'd been Lecturing for 7 years.  A chap who contacted me while I was there & said he was doing so because he was a friend of a friend of mine at the British Council,, suggested we work together: he had the premises for a school in Eton and I would bring over a couple of teachers & contacts from China to help teach at the school. It was all lined up & I saw this as a kind of Wonder-Job: I couldn't wait to get started. (And the plate glass windowed flat high up at tree level was all blonde wood & brushed-steel kitchen appliances.) The fourth day of being in England my putative "partner" declared bankruptcy. And I also discovered t...

           Mrs. Simpson's Regency Journal.                                     September 20, 1831.                                               The Vile Slum in Brighton   After I had writ in my journal the last time, it did strike me, of a sudden, that whosoever doth read these pages after me, might not be abiding in Brighton and may not know of our Dark Heart. For such it be: a-pulsing away right in the middle of our town and not even suspicioned  by most gentlefolk. Or not considered to be a suitable subject of conversation by those who do know of it. ‘Tis the area known as Pimlico. Though it was already a blot and a shame upon this town by the time we moved here from Tunbridge Wells, folk say it came quickly about, once people had to le...

                      The Brighton & Hove Circular Economy                   Action Plan 2020 - 2035 https://www.brighton-hove.gov.uk/business-and-trade/brighton-hove-circular-economy-action-plan-2020-2035#tab--promoting-circular-economy-activity-across-the-city This jargon-filled mission statement regarding recycling is published by Council. Full of momentary fashionable misuse of perfectly simple but unexplained concepts such as 'stakeholders' and 'circular economy', it is not aimed at local residents, small business and shop owners, those for whom English is a second language, or, importantly, the 'average' person . It is a mangled word-fest presumably aimed at other Councils, as was so much of Brighton & Hove Council's public communication under the previous administration. So as is usual with many of Councils "public" documents, two thirds of the population are confused ...

  The first time I ever acted in an historical play we were coached in the ways of walking as women of yesteryear did. Which didn’t seem at all strange to me at the time: at convent boarding schools we had been taught to walk the nunly walk: which turned out to be exactly the same method. But sanctified. I didn’t really understand why women used to walk differently then, and neither did my mother; who told me that her mother had also instructed her that a woman’s footprints should always be in a straight line: — one foot directly in front the other, as we’d been taught on both stage and in convents.  Yet it was only about 6 months ago that I suddenly had a lightbulb moment: women walked in that way because they menstruated! This thought didn’t arrive out of the blue; I had, by then, been researching the history of menstruation for months. With the help of the Brighton Museum I’d been able to start my research back in the Palaeolithic. Since then, I had become aware that apart ...