Lewes is lovely

For some reason, Beverley didn’t think it necessary to inform me before I left for the hinterlands of East Sussex that fireworks would be involved. When I was a child, firework night…….oh for God’s sake, you know what I’m going to say and anyway it doesn’t matter. I still ended up standing in the middle of a school playing-field somewhere in Brighton in a force nine gale inappropriately dressed. It could’ve been worse I suppose: I had intended to wear the little black dress and the fish-net tights for the evening thinking that we might be heading for the sophisticated night-spots. At one point it started to rain. Fortunately, Bev’s sister had lent us some samples from her collection of Edwardian umbrellas. The bad news was that we weren’t allowed to get them wet or use them as shelter from the hurricane in case they blew inside out. I accidentally dropped mine on the damp grass but I think I got away with it; everyone else being occupied with providing a chair for the recording photographer to stand on prior to his camera running out of battery two minutes into the display.

I’ve never been to Lewes before and it really is quite lovely. Rather too many hills perhaps for my liking and populated by folk who all have competing ideas on the location of my B & B in South Street and how to get there, but it has a castle and, having declared unilateral independence some years ago, its own currency. More importantly, about 80% of the shops are independent so quite delightful, especially at this time of year when there are gifts to buy. There is also a plethora of antique/junk emporia where one can purchase almost anything. For example, in the one where I left with a brass cupid bearing a three-pronged candlestick holder for just a negotiated tenner, it was possible to purchase a piece of attractive blue pottery dating back to the time and place of Jesus for only £63! Well, that’s what the label said. To be fair, you can (literally) pick up a bargain’s worth of Nabotean coins in Petra but……….

After the fireworks, we trundled off to the local pub to defrost. I didn’t think there were that many of us to begin with but ranks had swelled and we took over a whole corner and straddled a path to the bar. I didn’t know who many of these people were and was quite surprised when a woman from the other side of the room brought over a large selection of grand-children of assorted sizes who she lined up in front of us. From the looks on the faces of my companions, I was not alone in being unsure of procedure. Should we give them marks out of ten perhaps? We smiled inanely and the crowd dispersed.

Later in the evening, there was a very bizarre conversation about the protocol involved in using other people’s bathroom facilities. I didn’t understand this at all…maybe it’s another ritual peculiar to East Sussex? I went outside to have a fag in the pouring rain as you do when feeling surplus to requirements. I made a new friend out there who spent a good ten minutes regaling me with his views on the apparent turnaround of Saturday night values: i.e. the pub’s full of kids running wild, dominoes has been replaced by Pass the Baby and the smokers are consigned to lurking in doorways in the cold. He’s got a point.

A particularly surreal experience on Sunday morning in the B & B: it was, of course, Remembrance Day so all the Radio 4 programmes had been hijacked thereby causing more confusion than the morning after the night when the clocks go back. I began my breakfast not to the accompaniment of Clive James, but to what sounded ominously like a Brian May version of Abide With Me. Very odd.