LYRICS // Ghosts (2007)

I was born in Brighton, a seaside town on the South coast of England. Despite this beginning and several later visits to then-still-resident grandparents, I grew up getting to know an entirely different place - Cardiff, the city I got my schooling in.

As soon as the opportunity presented itself, in the form of a college place, I found my way back to Brighton - delighted to get out of Wales and having a fixed idea in my head of Brighton as some kind of escapist oasis amidst all the mundanity of the rest of Britain.

It was there that I wiled away my twenties. I somehow made it through my University years and racked up over a decade back in the place of my birth, wading through loves and losses, rock 'n' roll bands that came and went, and all matter of limits explored. It's the kind of place that people escape to from whatever is getting them down in their own part of the country and then reinvent themselves as something new. It can also become a certain kind of trap - a great place to explore an idea but rarely to make a success of it.

After about 15 years of trying, my musical ambitions reached a certain zenith point when The Zamora had their moment in the national spotlight. To my surprise, just as the band's star was in ascent, I was rather unceremoniously booted out of the line-up.

I had to come to terms with the fact that the future I'd spent years carving out for myself had been taken out of my hands. Given that I wasn't really going anywhere career-wise either and with an ultimately disastrous relationship topping off my seaside downfall, my time in my 'home town' drew to a natural end.

Although it took a while to come to the decision, I ultimately decided that I wasn't going to wallow in misery but would do something about it instead - as big and radical a challenge as I could give myself - and throw myself into somewhere as crazy and far away as Tokyo to see what happened.

By the time I left Brighton, I was seeing ghosts of my former past all over the city. Ex-flames with new beaus, those I'd once rocked with, workplaces I'd had to put up with in the absence of something better, on every street corner. This song began as an expression of that feeling and was originally written in the present tense - the place that was haunting me. The melody came naturally with the words - a kind of melancholy waltz-y feel - and has changed little since being written.

Songwriting is often an exorcism in itself. Once I wrote the song, I felt a little better about things, that was that. I didn't really expect to see it ending up recorded and released on an album, least of all produced in Japan. However, when it came to writing the material for 'Best Before End', this was a natural to pull out of the bag.

Of course, by the time it was exhumed, the feelings had changed and the ghosts I'd spoken of belonged to another very distant world. I'd also become more reflective about Brighton and what I'd actually gained from my time there, so the song was adapted slightly with a change of tense suggesting that my haunting was over and I'd learned from the experience.

Telling the above tale explains most of the song, but there is just a little more imagery in it that might require some background.

Woody Allen, when asked why all his films were set in Manhattan, once commented something along the lines that as the whole world was there, it provided all the inspiration he needed to make movies. Unwilling to leave the town for many years for related reasons - my whole world was there - I felt the same about Brighton at one time. In time however, my perspective on it changed and I realised that there was a whole world outside of my seaside shelter. Woody Allen now also makes films in locations other than Manhattan - a natural progression, I feel.

'All India Radio' came to me from Salman Rushdie's Booker-winning novel 'Midnight's Children', one of my favourite works of fiction. Along with many of the other characters in the book, Saleem Sinai (the protagonist) is born with a certain set of special powers. All children that are born on or after the stroke of midnight on the moment that India is declared independent from British rule are endowed with certain powers and the closer they were born to the striking of the clock, the stronger their powers. Saleem is born as the clock hits 12:00, so his unique abilities are that much more pronounced.

Each gift that the children have been endowed with is unique to them, with the protagonist's being a telepathic ability. As this develops and as he ages throughout the novel, this ability becomes very useful to the rest of the children, who convene in great conferences in Saleem's head. Rushdie had his character comparing the feeling of all these competing voices in one space to All India Radio, the nation's radio broadcaster and home to the hundreds of languages contained within the country.

Prior to the point of my departure from Brighton, I found myself juggling a profusion of multiple identities drawn from the various activities I'd engaged in during my time there - rock singer, teacher, student, manager, unemployed, hedonist, shop assistant, lover, loser, volunteer, bus driver, the list goes on. All these different voices, different versions of myself vying for attention, began to drown each other out, leading to a feeling of like listening to All India Radio.

The song was recorded and released by Shelf Life, staying as a slow-paced and reflective tune. At the time of writing, it doesn't appear on the band's MySpace page but is available for purchase from .

Ghosts

That city’s streets,
And all its heartbeats,
Got me wherever I turned.

The riffs and the pages,
The loves through the ages,
Hit me like children and burned.

But when I stopped to think for a minute,
Of how much I had grown,
And used the eyes in the back of my head,
To look at what that city’d shown – me.

I laid dem all to rest.
Yeah, I laid dem all to rest.

There was a time,
When that place was mine,
Like Woody Allen’s Manhattan.

Now it’s just a shell,
A lingering smell,
I’d done all I could have done.

But when I stopped to think for a minute,
Of how much I had grown,
And used the eyes in the back of my head,
To look at what that city’d shown – me.

I laid dem all to rest.
Yeah, I laid dem all to rest.

Voices went round in my head.
Games once played out, now dead.
It felt like All India Radio.

Bodies piled up on the floor.
Couldn’t take it no more,
It felt like All India Radio.

But when I stopped to think for a minute,
Of how much I had grown,
And used the eyes in the back of my head,
To look at what that city’d shown – me.

I laid dem all to rest.
Yeah, I laid dem all to rest.

ARTICLES // Open Up (2003)

This article was originally published in Brighton's 'Insight' magazine in 2003. While the content is anything but 'gonzo' in style, the writing of it has its own story, created as it was under pretty frenetic circumstances.

Back in early 2003, my personal life was hanging in the balance and, unbeknownst to me, my time in Brighton was drawing to a close. I needed time and space to get away and think a little. My father presented me with a sudden opportunity to get away to Africa for a week in order to celebrate my sister's 30th birthday with her - she was living in Tanzania at the time.

Never one to stare a gift horse in the mouth and knowing that it was both what I needed and something I'd long dreamed of too, I jumped at the chance and took him up on the offer. It was also during the period that the clamour for war in the Middle East was reaching fever pitch and I was delighted to have the chance to get away from those voices in the corridors of power and in the media that were steamrollering the Western and Arab worlds towards disaster. The millions who'd marched through London on the previous month hadn't been able to stop a thing, and there was a depressing stench of inevitability about the whole misadventure.

About a week before my hastily arranged flight was due to depart, 'Insight' magazine got in touch with me to write a piece on Brighton artists Open Houses schemes that run during the Brighton Festival. Then as now, I'm not a writer with offers of publication lining up at my door. I agreed to do it despite the lunatic demands that it'd place on my schedule, glad of the opportunity to get my writing out to an audience.

There were a couple of days within which to do the research, mainly during the lunch breaks of the new job I'd just started. Grabbed my notes and interviews, packed my bags and made for Heathrow where I was to begin writing the first draft. Waiting in some airport bar or other for my father to arrive, I managed to at least get it started.

Had been going to write more on the flight, but didn't manage to. Got off the plane at Dar Es Salaam and was confronted by tropical heat of which I'd never known and my first time setting foot on African soil. This fact was rather more overwhelming than a publishing deadline and I soaked in every new sight, smell and sound.


Back at my sister's place, I managed to finish off writing the piece and then had to type it up. The power supply to small African villages tends to be intermittent at best, yet grabbing whatever moments of juice I could out of a faltering laptop, I got the piece written up.

The deadline came into play again and as they didn't have an Internet connection at the house, we had to drive an hour to the nearest town to find the Internet cafe that she often used. Slow as the connection was and as old as the computer there was too, I managed to get the article sent off to the magazine just about in time for their submission deadline.

There was something quite bizarre about writing of people in an English seaside town letting the public into their houses to look at their paintings from the perspective of a creaky Internet cafe in a dusty town that opened out onto the African bush. It may have played its own part in helping me to reassess my priorities and draw the conclusion that the time was ripe to expatriate and see what else was out there other than my own little island.

The original article was edited slightly by 'Insight' and appears in that form here. Tempting as it was to go fully gonzo and write instead about the circumstances in which the story was written, I managed to write just about the Brighton artists after all!

Photo of Tanzanian villager's house by Hans Jamet.

Open Up

It must be something in the air. Not just the fresh sea breezes that can awaken the senses, but a sprinkle of that extra ‘something’ that makes Brighton such a touch paper for innovation, such a creative laboratory. Some early techniques of cinema were developed in Hove. Anita Roddick helped to usher in the concept of the ‘ethical consumer’ with her first Body Shop in Brighton. In the early Seventies, the means that would allow networks to communicate with each other and pave the way for what we now know to be the Internet, were presented at Sussex University.

On a lesser scale, while many people wouldn’t dream of letting the general public across their threshold for a look around their own private space, a growing number of individuals from right across the city, openly encourage it during the burst of spring madness that is the Brighton Festival.

‘I think the visiting public initially feel a sense of wonder that anyone would do such a thing’, says Jehane Boden Spiers, an Open House artist. ‘They enjoy meeting artists who make the work, as opposed to in galleries and shops, which are far less personal. They also enjoy seeing the work in context and I think it helps people to think about how to display artwork in their own homes.’

The Open House concept began in 1982 by Ned Hoskins. Frustrated by the lack of opportunity to exhibit art in Brighton at the time, he opened his house to the public and also exhibited other artists. In 1989, the ‘Five at Fiveways’ group was set up. Such was its success that it exploded across Brighton during the 1990’s. Other artists joined the group, other groups sprang up all over the region (Kemp Town Artists, Seven Dials Artists, the Lewes Group), and the concept became arguably the main attraction to the Festival itself.

The Kemp Town Open House trail stretching from the brightly coloured terraces near Queen's Park right down to the sea is a particular favourite with tourists as a fair degree of the art features boats, the sea, Victorian frontages and The Downs. Belinda Lloyd, co-ordinator, told The Insight, 'This year musicians are going to join the trail so as people wander the streets of Kemp Town they will be accompanied by buskers and in the houses may even come upon a harpist, saxophonist or string quartet!'

Colin Ruffell, a former secretary of the Fiveways Artists Group and exhibiting artist himself, estimates that there are now over 200 Open Houses and Studios operating during the festival, with 100-300 visitors per week, making up to 100,000 people enjoying these unique opportunities to experience art. Open Houses can now be found all over Sussex, including Ditchling, Hove and Portslade, and have even spread to places like Oxford, Cambridge, Kent, Cornwall and Buckinghamshire.

Jehane says ‘anything and everything!’ is on display– Ceramics, Jewellery, Painting, Sculpture, Mosaic, Textiles, Wood, Metal, Glass, Photography, Video, Literature. It makes it possible for artists to make their work more affordable to the buying public. Visitors can also commission pieces directly with the artist, which could be an otherwise daunting prospect.

Open Houses have become so successful that they may have even outgrown the Festival itself. Jehane Boden Spiers says that it has become quite a feat to even see 10% of what is on show. ‘I can see more houses opening up at other times of the year, apart from May,’ she says. ‘This is already happening… some houses have organised Christmas shows’.

Information on Open Houses 2003 can be found in the Brighton Festival Fringe brochure, which is available from thousands of outlets across the city. The following weblinks also contain further information:

Fiveways Artists Group

The first Open House art buying website

Colin Ruffell’s own site

ARTICLES // The Sound Of The City (2002)

Between 2000 and 2003, I ran a music organisation in Brighton called Sounds Phenomenal. I joined them initially as a volunteer, to help out with organising a conference when I was laid off from the book trade following a merger-related branch closure. To my surprise, I ended up inheriting the organisation.

Whilst this gave me unprecedented opportunities for skills and contacts building, it also became a little bit of an albatross for me. It was inherently difficult to actually make any money from it at the time, yet I seemed to be somehow compelled to keep it going. This meant doing more and more events to 'build the brand' and give it a history, but that I was unable to make a living from. I guess that it contributed in its own way to my leaving the UK to live abroad.

The final event I did as Sounds Phenomenal was a 19 act live showcase at Sussex University, titled 'The Sound Of The City 2002'. The image above is the front cover of the brochure that I designed for the event, with the 'seagull & headphones' image being a Brighton homage to the Woodstock 'dove on guitar' graphic. You can read more about the showcase itself here.

Having managed to secure a media partner to sponsor some of the showcase (The Latest), I had what was probably my first opportunity to write an 'advertorial'. The article that appeared in their issue that week is below.

The Sound Of The City

This fair city of ours has itself many reputations. They stretch from the seaside Victoriana of the naughty weekend and the coastal escape from the demands of modern Metropolitan living, to a political test bed for Government policy initiatives or the 'British San Francisco' of its large gay community. The Brighton (and Hove) of the imagination is thus a multi-faceted creature. It is, however, as the cultural epicentre of the South Coast that Brighton embeds itself most strongly in the minds of its residents and visitors. Witness the quarter of a million people who turned up when Fatboy Slim announced his free party on the beach this summer. It is 'the place to be' to have a good time.

Although there is a common complaint that Brighton is more of a club town and that it doesn't do enough to support live music, the evidence would often appear to contradict that. The Concorde 2 succeeds in putting on a huge range of live music, and most medium-sized touring bands fit in an appearance there. Promoters like Melting Vinyl ensure such treats as The Strokes coming here before they appeared anywhere else in the UK, and Lee Hazlewood's only 2002 concert outside London. The Essential Festival has brought such musical titans as James Brown, Public Enemy and Lee 'Scratch' Perry here. And then there are the universities.

Lord Dearing, one of the government's key advisers on higher education, was recently reported as saying that universities should become 'giants' in their regions, boosting the local area with ideas and highly skilled people, and promoting the regional economy and culture in addition to their more traditional academic roles.

Sounds Phenomenal has been helping Sussex University with this aim since 2000, having brought live music back on to campus after an absence of some years, and are providing the Freshers' Week showcase of the best of the city's unsigned live acts.

Having started life an a community arts project that provided access to to music making and training for young people in the area, SP has a pedigree of supporting music at its grassroots. We are therefore proud to present 'The Sound Of The City 2002', in association with Jagermeister, The Latest and Latest Homes, USSU and Sol Beer, as a sampler or 'live flyer' of the best of Brighton's live, unsigned acts.

This year's line-up offers a greater diversity than in previous years, running from the live loops of Phloot Groove and the girl on girl hip-hop action of Plan B, to Jah Love's reggae system and the open scapes of local alt country types, JP Delph & The Mighty Fine. It also includes sets from SP guitar-based favourites such as Shark, Liquid Laugh and the Radio 1 playlisted Agent J, who will be opening and closing the proceedings.

Brighton is not only a place for a great time, but it also produces some extraordinary talent from its artists and players. Sample 'The Sound Of The City' and find out for yourself.

NUS cardholders only. IDs will be checked.

ARTICLES // Nobody Told Me There'd Be Days Like These (1997)

What a difference 10 years makes.

This article was written for Babble, the (probably now defunct) University of Brighton's Student Union magazine, following the first few months of Britain's new Labour government back in 1997. It is an early attempt at political commentary.

After 18 years of Tory misrule, there was a certain national euphoria at their ousting. Blair and his new government were seen as a bright new hope for a country that had been downtrodden by its leaders for decades. Once in power, they became another government, another thing to criticise, another focus for peoples rage. Diana died too, and the jubilation that swept the country in May dissipated into a national outpouring of grief.

Blair's government have had their own fair share of trouble from political legacies they inherited, the old guard and other unpreventable factors, including the fuel protests, the Countryside Alliance and Foot And Mouth Disease. However, it is the PM's willingness, even eagerness, to go to war that will most likely mark his tenure at Number 10. Kosovo and Sierra Leone carried the mark of 'humanitarian intervention'. He happily bombed Iraqi no-fly zones with pal Clinton. And then came his cosying up to the Bush administration (amongst my many reasons to leave the country), going to war again in Afghanistan despite Britain's long history of ultimately failing to subjugate the Afghan people, and of course the ongoing disaster that is Iraq.

The Labour government claim a long list of achievements of their time in power too, and while the country has clearly improved in many ways, Iraq has divided the country from its rulers and damaged Britain's standing in the world that will probably be felt for generations to come.

This piece captures some of the almost innocent pre-9/11 era, when people were just getting used to complaining a little about the government again and evokes seaside Brighton too.

1997 was certainly an interesting year. 2007 is still so full of fear.

Nobody Told Me There'd Be Days Like These

Now that the 'peoples' government have become just 'the government' following numerous blunders and U-turns – tobacco, fees and benefits for instance, we can all heave a sigh of relief and get back on with complaining.

But if you can cast your minds back to the beginning of term...

...Brighton, throughout the summer months a decidedly 'relaxed' town, always undergoes a period of frantic activity during the transition between late summer and early winter (end of September to beginning of October). The biggest impact, after the tourists, daytrippers and foreign students have eaten their last ice cream cones and thrown their final stones into the sea, is the return of the tens of thousands of students who pass through the two universities every year. If that doesn't swell the town's ranks enough, the students are joined by the politicians, reporters and policemen who start to filter in throughout the weekend.

By Monday, the Annual Labour Party Conference bestrides the hotels and The Brighton Centre, cordoning off the seafront and returning the gaze of the eyes of the nation. The Palace Pier appears on TV at least 10 times a day as some Westminster luminary or other trot out in front of the cameras for their comments on what's going on 'inside'.

Brighton is often the scene of many classic conference moments that define or permanently alter a party's career. Neil Kinnock found himself unwittingly splashed over Britain's front pages when he failed to win at the old Brighton game of 'run away from the tide at the last minute to avoid getting wet' and promptly fell into the sea. In 1984, the IRA came within a whisker of taking out most of the Government front bench including the then-recent Falklands veteran Margaret Thatcher, with their bombing of the Grand Hotel. 1997 in Brighton will go down as the first Labour Conference in 18 years when they can revel in the knowledge that they are actually in power following 'those election results'.

Can we still allow ourselves a wry smile at the memory of the evening of May 1st? Particularly as Tory boy Wee Willie Hague (Notting Hill, nice one!)'s firm and decisive direction for the party of 'No, no, no, we still don't like Europe' is pushing ever closer to the icy waters of the North Sea.

Of course I stayed up for Portillo! You wouldn't go to bed before the winning goal at the World Cup, would you?

Obviously, once you vote them in (whoever they are) they always become 'the government' in the end. But (and here comes the point of the piece) haven't these been strange times to be living through in Britain of late? Especially given the passing away of a certain Ms. Spencer during the summer. Crying in the streets! Most irregular, eh?

So have we finally grabbed hold of the Old Guard of Old Britain, caught them by the scruffs of their necks and shouted back 'No! We've had enough and we won't take any more. We're gonna run things from now on and show you how it's done. Haven't you heard of caring before?' With young British music, film, fashion and art trading global stamps with each other, we have an increasingly polarising world as we hurtle towards another Year Zero (or by the Christian calendar at least). There's a lot more crazy shit yet to come, you can be sure of that.

Winding down the nineties isn't far off now, (thinks – 'still haven't found a decent name for the next decade yet'). But you may find that having spent your youth through them won't have been the least exciting time of your life. Strange days indeed!

SHORT STORIES // A New Page Turns (2006)

New Year's Eve 1999 was a moment in time that had assumed mythic status during the latter part of the 20th Century. Being now on the other side of it and living in a post-911 and post-Iraq War world, it almost seems like an innocent blip on history's brief timesheet. After all, people still hadn't even really started taking global warming that seriously then either! I guess that, like with myself, it was another New Year, another party, another moment in a lifetime of many, without many of the massive significances that it was previously endowed with.

This story was pulled and edited down from a section of a novel-in-progress. Novels can be written in a matter of months (to the experienced) or can be strung out over years and years - particularly for first time novelists. Mine falls more into the 'years and years' category. Sometimes, a story comes out in its own time and will not be rushed. Hopefully, this results in a better tale, but it can also be a little frustrating to have such a hefty piece of work just languishing around in one's consciousness for so long.

The protagonist of the novel, and thus this story, is a young man named Will Evans. Perhaps an easy way out for a first time novelist, but it falls pretty squarely into the 'semi-autobiographical' camp, although the good thing about the 'semi' part is that you can play a little fast and loose with your own history. Still, this tale does follow my own New Year 1999 pretty closely.

I put the story together as a submission to caféDiverso, a multi-media travel publisher based in Barcelona, who were running a book competition called 'Everyone Has A Good Story: Voices of the UK'. As it happened, after submitting the story I never heard back from them and have no idea whether my yarn made it into their book. Having written it however, I was determined to get it published somewhere, and got it up at a website called 'The Deckchair', a site for Brighton writers. It can be seen here.

How was your 1999 > 2000 moment?

A New Page

The day that people the world over had been waiting for so long for finally came to pass. The new millennium. New Year’s Eve, 1999. The closing of an old chapter and the opening of another new one.

Was it a seismic shift in mankind’s history? Not really. It was mostly just another day.

It had been a moment in time that for many had assumed mythic status. By the year 2000, everybody would be wearing silver suits, eating food pills and living in moon colonies. Despite the promises though, by the time it came around the personal jetpacks promised for the kids of the future were still some way off. Essentially, most of the world used the passing of the new millennium as an excuse to party for a couple of days. Fireworks manufacturers the planet over rubbed their hands with glee.

When younger, Will Evans’d had grand plans and schemes for the moment. He wanted to be somewhere very cool, to be able to pass a memory and a half on to the grandchildren.

‘Where were you at the turn of the millennium, Grandpa?’

‘I was drinking tea at the Great Pyramids, my child’

He was due to turn 29 in the summer of 2000 and there were a number of personal milestones that he’d hoped to pass by then. Of course, life and fortunes are rarely as easy as that. In the end, the attainable had to be settled on and he decided to simply have a good time on the night that everyone had been waiting for. Like on so many other nights, Will was to find himself going out to a pub in Brighton with friends and getting royally pissed.

So, for him and his pals, the evening of the last day of the 20th Century began at someone’s flat. The girls were all largely decked out in something sparkly or glittering. The boys were mostly all smartly dressed too, with even some ties on show. Once everybody was inside, coats off, music on, cigarettes lit, a couple of bottles of champagne were pulled out, the corks popped and the merriment began.

Snacks, drinks, joints, jokes, laughs, a little dancing, the group of friends bonded quickly on a night such as it was and generally got themselves in the mood for what could be the party of parties in a town that was generally reputed to party hard as it was.

Once the evening had worn on a little, they decided to commence the trek into the town centre, where much of the rest of Brighton was likely to be moving and shaking their things. The streets were thronged with eager revellers, which made a brisk pace tough. Everywhere, people were drinking at bus stops, cramming into pubs, singing at the top of their voices or shouting salutations at strangers.

The journey to the centre took them past the pubs, estate agents, convenience stores and kebab houses that lined the way. Charity shops had people slumped in doorways, too wasted already to make it as far as midnight. Drivers who were still sober enough to drive were parping their horns in harmony with each other. Gaggles of young girls dressed for considerably warmer weather roamed in packs past Woolies and Argos, their glittered heels clacking in group rhythms. At Churchill Square, sullen teenagers hung around in gangs in front of the shopping centre, some mucking about with skateboards, others furtively smoking cigarettes.

They approached the Clock Tower to find a large volume of human traffic moving across their path, heading towards West Street. This townie mecca of cheap drinks, cheap pulls, dodgy music in large clubs, kebabs, student nights and fights that led straight down to the sea was the last place in town Will could see himself wanting to be that night.

They crossed the river and moved on. Halfway down North Street and Will’s crew cut a right into the bird’s nest of streets and bohemian hangouts that made up The Laines, heading for the pub where advance tickets had been bought. Almost everywhere was tickets only that night, with many venues getting away with charging astronomical entry fees.

The atmosphere and the events of the night were not that different from that of an average Saturday night. The pub was heaving and the music was very loud. Getting served at the bar required a lot of patience, often taking up to half an hour to get served. Seats and tables were largely all taken. The air was thick with smoke. But at least they’d managed to get in somewhere. The casualties of the night were piled up on the streets on their way in to town. Everybody else who couldn’t get in anywhere and were destined to wander the streets waiting for the clock to strike could be watched through windows steamed with condensation.

Eventually, the conditions in the pub wore our plucky partygoers down to the point where they decided that it was time to leave. 11.30pm had already passed, later than most British pubs were usually open. They’d had a good night and were in high spirits but it was time to take some air and join the crowds wending their way down to the beach.

It was only fitting, having been born in the town in the first place, then lived there again for the preceding eight years and mostly within spitting distance from the sea, that Will should be seeing in the new millennium on Brighton Beach. It was a stretch of land, sea and sky rich with memories and laden with symbolism for him. He’d played there as a child, getting his first taste of swimming in the ocean and taken long walks along it with his family. With friends he’d got pissed, stoned or partied there. With girlfriends he’d frolicked and kissed on the stony shoreline. It was a place too for silent contemplation and escape, a soothing environment of expansive emptiness, summer crowds aside, where a young man could sit and think to calm the raging torrents of his mind at times of trouble. And it was also where seemingly half of Brighton had chosen to spend their time waiting for midnight.

The whole seafront was shrouded in mist, a seasonal fug that could have only rolled in from the sea. The lights from the pier diffused in the haze of the night sky, offering a kaleidoscope of beautiful colours for the delectation of the inebriated crowds but making viewing of Brighton’s pending firework display a little veiled.

The moment drew closer. People shuffled around, clutching their bottles or cans, smoking cigarettes or joints, chatting with friends or neighbouring strangers, all looking at their wrists and waiting, wondering, hoping…

…10, 9, 8, 7… 10, 9, 8… 5, 4, 3… 6, 5, 4… 2, 1… 2, 1… 3, 2, 1. Pockets of cheers went up as midnight struck for some. With no Big Ben to unify the reactions it was more like a Mexican Wave than an explosion. Others joined in as more watches struck twelve. Eventually, the whole seafront gathering was united in breathing in the first gasps of fresh air of the twenty first century. The fireworks were launched from the pier with bangs and awed cries. Thousands of mobile phones went off simultaneously, each signal jostling for space amidst the crowded airwaves. Friends hugged and kissed each other, wishing a happy New Year and good luck with the next one. Strangers did too. Shouts and cheers rang out along the beach.

After about half an hour of kissing, congratulating, cheering and greeting the new dawn, and with little left to keep them on the beach, people began to drift away to the TVs they’d left behind, the beds that were waiting for them or the parties they had to join that would carry on until daylight or when the last person dropped. The trickle of departees soon became a stream, which in turn mutated into a river. Soon, a sea of people filled the streets, all trudging away from the beach and off to somewhere else.

He awoke the next day to find out that it again gone dark outside and he had slept through the first day of the new millennium. ‘Oh well’, he thought, ‘a night of such binging and frivolities needs to be followed by some serious recuperation’. He’d made it. They’d all made it. Broken on through to the other side.

He went into the kitchen and put the kettle on for his first cup of tea of the day, month, year, decade, century, millennium. Will had the flat to himself. He took his tea into the lounge. Some soft lighting and a little music were in order – it had to be The Beatles. He began to skin up.

…I read the news today, oh boy…

‘What does the future hold?’ he wondered. ‘What happens next? What happens next?’