Benefit Street, Brighton.

To-day I gave a talk at the Sallis Benney Theatre. I had to.  It was the only way to tell if I was really getting better or if I was just on a temporary, manic, phase. Quite the conundrum. I explained in the first post of this year that I had had a rather long-drawn-out mental breakdown last year  (which was honestly earned!). It involved realising that I had to take on a whole new life. And I didn't know if I was going to be able to do that, or if it was even going to be possible. I was starting to write again - but did I have my mojo back? Or had it taken another turn? There was only one way to find out so I did it. And the answer was: - hell yeah! From the moment I got up from my seat it was as though all the events of the past three years had never happened: I was back in my skin. Because the brief had been to talk about something one felt strongly about, or had a passion about - and I was suddenly spoilt for choice! Women in the canon of English Literature? Chi...

The sounds of tweetering in the dovecotes for once drowned out the maniacal screeches of the seagulls to-day, as Britonians and Hove Actuallys waited for the local council - The Brighton and Hove City Council - to hand down its budget. Oh, it'll be debated and argued about for weeks to come so I shan't bother with what's in the budget.  What both delights and dismays are what isn't in the budget - for which everyone living on Benefits Street, Brighton, also gives 'umble thanks. What DIDN'T go in was the inhumane idea of adding to the current paucity of public facilities by cutting out even more. Obviously made by people who are never more than a few minut es away from their cars - and home. But rousingly cheered by anyone who has ever got caught short walking home through Brighton and Hove to get to the other side...before you even get to the road home. It can be agonizing; and accounts for the pungent smells that assail one from various walls, garden...

(I couldn't come up with a Benefits Street Brighton pic. that was apposite. This, therefore is a photo of the legendary Sanitary Squad on Brighton Beach in the days before public conveniences, ridding the beach of  waste matter.) And yes, I shuddered when I wrote the post title. But then I reminded myself of the fact that if it hadn't become such a popular topic I wouldn't be writing this at all. Ergo I'm the only one wincing like a Dickensian spinster at the word itself. The subject of human solid waste was never  avoided by our ancestors who  had no prudery about the human body and its workings, until Victoria. But then neither had the subject of body lice or ear-wax been shunned until Victoria either. Yet body-lice and ear wax are not thrown about with such gaiety and abandon, as is the subject of, I would argue, the least appealing of all normal bodily functions. It's understandable that, as an emancipated society who has torn asunder the shack...

Benefits Street, Brighton. February 7th, 2016. BAN 'EM!! I accepted, from the day I arrived in Brighton, that The Laines - what's left of the ancient cobbled heart of the city - has been given over to tourists of the better-padded variety. That's ok.  They have to go somewhere.  Let them eat in overpriced venues and buy the antique jewellery none of us can afford, and go on walking tours wherever their Michelin guides take them.  We love 'em because the tourist dollar makes our world go round. But not the North Laines, people.  Is nothing to be real any more? Because the reality of Brighton, apart from the glittering, bijou jewels of bespoke individualism in The Laines, is a tad more tawdry.  Homelessness is rife here.  As are penniless design students, actors, photographers, eccentrics, and seamy street people. Creativity is rife here too, though and ways to help pay one's part of the rent in the crowded shared digs around ...

Benefits Street, Brighton. February Ist. I looked back at the very first of th ese very patchy blogs to-day. I couldn't remember when I wrote it, but I can tell that I was very, very angry. I was going to delete whatever I had written last year; because last year lies under a pretty frightening fog for me, and so much of it is sketchy.  But  I'm not going to axe them now that I've thought about it.  Because last year I had a nervous breakdown. And I guess whatever the hell I wrote last year was what I was honestly thinking -so yes, I was very, very angry. And I'm going to own that. Now I'm finally climbing back up out of that place, I can see that a person's brain doesn't just yell "Enough!" and pull down the shutters on a whim. The shutters only slam shut when it's  already had enough. So I was aware of that fact - it had just never walked up and slapped me upside the head before. Because this isn't the first time I'v...