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| The English Channel in all it's winter fury. |
In the imaginary league of top 10 places begining with Ha, what could top Hamburg? I'll tell you. Hastings. It could but it doesn't. Nestled down on the south coast betwixt Rye and America it stands, a once proud and popular seaside resort, it has now gone right down the shitter and is home to nothing but seagulls, people with tracksuits and tattoos who smoke fags and a really nice hotel called The Swan House Hotel or somesuch name. How do I know this? Because I just went for a weekend away there with Liz Baines. Who the bloody hell is liz Baines? My girlfriend, that's who.
Yes my one reader, I've only gone and got a girlfriend. How? Some people ask. The truth is I don't know but rest assured booze played it's alchemic role. That's correct. When I met her she was completely drunk as a lord and I can only assume that the drink had, in her head at least, transformed my face (a normally unlovely collection of ill-matched, so-called features) into an approximation of something not hideous. Et voila! Girlfriend. Good old booze.
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| Skimming stones. This was a niner. Look at that stance. Low centre of gravity, good follow through, eyes on the horizon. A group of German youths nearby tried to emulate. Needless to say, when it comes to bouncing objects across the surface of the water, we British are de best. If you know what I mean. And I think many of you do. |
Anyhoo, we went to Hastings on a road trip and stayed for the weekend. Activities included lying down, lively debate in pubs, fish and chips, a 10 mile walk along the cliffs, a "99", lying down, a game of Pirate golf, eating thai food in a bookshop, lying down, throwing stones in the sea, a lively game of spoof, lying down and observing the town of Hastings and it's denizens.
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| The Hastings Pirate Golf Tournamet 2012. I wasn't really taking it that seriously. I was pretending. For a joke. Ha ha ha ha. Like that. |
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| The 12th hole. A par one. Basically if you got the ball into the skull's mouth it rolled down a pipe and popped straight into the hole. |
Yes. After three days spent mainly asleep in a town I've never been before, I am now an expert on Hastings, its peoples and its ways.
All Hastings is divided into two parts.
1. The Old Town
2. The rest of it.
The Old Town is full of ancient beamed dwellings and old fishermen's cottages. It is very nice and if the hotel was anything to go by, the houses can be lovely. The rest of it is home to a mixture of gaudy amusment arcades, crap pubs, the sea, some faded grandeur, a smell and the kind of chain shops you find in every High Street the length and breadth of the land.
It is home to much of Sussex's unemployed, which was a bit of an eye opener. It must be frustrating being unemployed (having said that, I am currently sitting in Nero's on Theobaldy Road in the middle of the day and I'm fucking liking it - but of course the circs are diff. Diff circs.) but being unemployed in one of Britain's shittest towns rubs salt into the wound a bit. The uniform is track suit, snarl, a fag and a baby. If it weren't so stereotypical it would be tragic. Anyway this heady mix of the unemployed, bikers, stag dos, hen dos and visitors intent on having a great time makes for a lively Saturday night. The screaming went on well into the early hours.
Compared to Hamburg it's.....errrmm..... well it's errrmm......no, they're so different you can't compare them at all. You can compare Hastings to some of the fishier parts of Shanghai and it gives a good account of itself.
So to sum up in four words:
Great. Smelly. Golf. Hat.
