Waiting in Kensington Gardens in a Suit

I am waiting in Kensington Gardens in a suit – a sentence with very different connotations to a Londoner. Brighton’s version of Kensington Gardens has no trees, nor blades of grass, nor princess Di memorial fountains – though in a window across the street, strapped to a mannequin, there is an outfit for a Goth princess, all PVC with a tiara lined with spikes.

The Brighton version of Kensington Gardens isn’t a posh tart of a park, but a tight street lined with very Brighton shops selling fat trainers and art-house books and knickers patterned with skulls and roses. People seem to have been funnelled into this narrow thoroughfare from all the ends of town, as if to get from any A to any B it is compulsory to pass through here, to clash with other shoppers as if between the gnashing rocks of the Bosphorus. If Brighton were an earthquake, the epicentre it would be.

I stand, in my suit, outside Resident – every town should have one – trying not to look like I’m in a suit, and presumably failing, because I am. I haven’t been here in a suit before, and I wonder what people think of me. They don’t think anything, I shouldn’t wonder, though I can’t help feel a bit like Captain Kirk, beamed down in a neat pyjama uniform to mix it with the ragged aliens. I wear a tie – I feel dirty nowadays without one, ever since David Cameron decided they were surplus – and shiny shoes and cufflinks, and it feels all wrong, though no one seems as bothered about the fact as me. I see youths in bandanas and skinny jeans, street vendors and pierced folk and pierced vendors and street folk, and I wish the girl I’m meeting would hurry up.

I spot Tommy, who does a double-take – probably thought I was one of those Londoners about whom people love to carp – usually people not in Brighton more than a few years themselves. Perhaps that’s the wonder of Brighton: it feels yours as soon as you arrive. And once you settle, still fresh from the London train, it becomes the anti-London, with its sea and pier and Downs and ability to walk everywhere in half an hour. The pubs are better, the air is fresher – you bump into people in the street! ‘Thank fuck it isn’t London’, you proclaim – and yet without extreme proximity to London, what would Brighton be? Eastbourne! Worthing! Hastings! London might be hell on earth, but better the fiery torture of the metropolis than the purgatory of forgotten towns yawning by the sea.

It starts to rain, so I go for a browse in Snooper’s Paradise, where I wander the cluttered aisles looking for I know not what. A gramophone? A Star Wars toothbrush? 46 episodes of Casualty on VHS? I try on a pork-pie hat, which makes me look very Jazz, I think, but I haven’t the balls to stand in the street and wear it while I wait, so I wander up and down Kensington Gardens with the hat in a flimsy plastic bag, wondering if people can see the hat in the bag and if it makes them think of me differently. If only I had a musical instrument case in the other hand... I consider going back to Snooper’s to see if they have any, but realise this is a bit ridiculous.

I enter a bookshop, where it feels like they’re trying to read me by the books I might have read. I look in a clothes shop, try on some trainers, and the guy in the shop says, ‘give ‘em a spin with the hat,’ and the whole ensemble doesn’t look too bad, I have to say, and it makes me wonder how long you’d have to wait for someone in Kensington Gardens before its artefacts overwhelmed you to the point of being perfectly camouflaged.

I don’t buy the trainers, but I keep the hat on. It has stopped raining and I walk up and down the narrow street, wondering why she’s so late, until my eyes lift to the balcony of Kensington’s café. There she is, laughing, and pointing quizzically at an imaginary hat on her head. I shake a comic fist at her, duck into the doorway and climb the stairs.

[Piece read at "The Brighton Moment" literary event, part of 2008 Brighton Festival]