Vertigo

Today

More on our walk to Brighton Pier last week. We bought ourselves ice-cream (where did the name "99" come from?) and decided to walk along the pier. These days it's just "The Pier", as the West Pier slowly disappears beneath the waves and the 3rd pier is confined to the history books.

We mostly kept to the sunny side and I took pictures of the sunnily-shimmering sea, the rotting piles just showing above the waves and the various bits of funfair apparatus. The whole of the far end of the pier is devoted to a permanent funfair and we watched the crazy people being swirled about in the air above us. Piped chart music kept us company the whole way.

The floor beneath was still composed of wooden planks, through which the sea could be seen. I looked down and tried to recapture the way I used to feel about this when I was small.

In My Day

Readers of this blog will by now know that Brighton was a very familiar place to me in my childhood. It was (and still is!) the nearest seaside resort to South London. Fifty minutes on the train from East Croydon and ten minutes from the station and we were at the Pier.

"Palace Pier" sounded so grand and, just as Paul and I did last week, we often were bought ice creams before sauntering along the wooden planks so precariously and arrogantly set over the turbulent sea.

Brighton was rather gone to seed in those days and the Pier seemed, to my junior eyes, to be a dangerous place. The metal struts were rusty and the wooden supports rotting. The gaps between the planks seemed huge and I wondered what would happen if my foot became stuck between them. Or, worse still, if I actually slipped between them into the raging waves.

There was a moment to be savoured as the view beneath one's feet changed from reassuring pebbles to treacherous water. In a flash I moved from safety to danger. Somehow it always seemed impossible windy.

There were still the little shops down the middle selling all kinds of rubbish and I remember clearly the glass animal man blowing molten glass gently into fantastic shapes. How I wanted to buy some but was never allowed.

Eventually we got to end of the Pier. There was no funfair is those days; rather the structure ended abruptly and I faced the unending ocean with all its terror and fantasy. People were fishing from the end and I stood astonished at their fearlessness. I was always quite glad to be back on terra firma proper, so to speak, never having quite trusted this rickety structure.

One thing I have learnt since then is how to eat a whole ice cream cone without losing most of the ice cream onto the pavement.