The problem with Brighton’s summer hordes

I expect there are those among you who are pleased to see their home towns returning to something like normality this summer. Well, not me.

Brighton and Hove was bliss during lockdown. Without the endless Southward drift of London chaff – pronounce that word anyway you feel works, hard F or soft – my adopted home regained something of the elegance that had led Noel Coward to include it and its seagulls in a list of things that have style.

Now, it has become once again the Brighton that Keith Waterhouse said, had the perpetual air that of a town that is helping the police with their inquiries.

Brighton does not so much attract visitors, one sometimes thinks, so much as end up with them, in the same way that dust bunnies end up under the bed and behind the radiator, leaves end up in the basement stairwell and a greasy coagulant ends up around the base of a down pipe.