A Brighton Boy Blogs

Years ago – in 1981 – when I was a mere fourteen years of age, I started doing the London to Brighton Bike Ride. Living in Brighton, we’d get up very early, catch one of the special trains to Clapham Junction, and proudly start the ride. Depending on the mood of our little group of friends, we’d either complete the thing in a few hours, or take our time, make loads of stops for Women’s Institute doughnuts and so on, and get into Brighton sometime in the afternoon. We’d be able to ride home to freshen up, then go out for a quick meal in the evening. It’s an annual event that holds a fond place in my memory over many consecutive years.

At some point in the late 80’s I stopped doing the ride. I had seen it get more over-crowded and dangerous, with so many people doing the ride unofficially that fast downhill sections like Slugwash Lane had become scenes of many inevitable accidents – one year I remember seeing the road awash with blood – and narrow uphill sections were turning the event into the London to Brighton Bike Shuffle.

I did the ride with my wife & friends a couple of years during the late 90s & early 2000s, but things weren’t much better. So it was goodbye L2B from me.

Yesterday I experienced once again the utter farce of what the London to Brighton Bike Ride does to Brighton. Road closures would be OK. Diversions fine. But when tens of thousands of extra cars (many of them 4×4 domestic trucks) are coming into Brighton for the sole reason that they’re picking up one or more cyclists, something is badly wrong. Traffic down a 15-mile stretch of the A23 came to a virtual standstill. Doesn’t the British Heart Foundation care about it? Surely the pollution alone should tell them that something has to change – it certainly can’t be good for the heart, and I wonder what the British Lung Foundation would say on the matter. And making it the day of countless other summer events, village fetes, and indeed Father’s Day – that’s just asking for trouble.

I daresay nothing will change next year. It’s a stupid, overhyped event which has become unmanageable. Sure it had noble roots and a great cause behind it, but nowadays it’s just a menace. At the very least it needs a new route, a major rethink, better public transport coordination, and a ban on pickups by car. The London to Brighton Bike Ride has gone bad.

The BBC has long been known for its excellent science & nature programmes. I grew up on them; some thirty years ago David Attenborough himself introduced me to Darwinian evolution through the process of Natural Selection in his seminal series “Life on Earth”. Yes, that was back in 1979 when I was just 12 years old. They have always been the ordinary person’s way into even the most complex science.

Now the BBC’s “South Pacific”, being shown back-to-back with Dr Alice Roberts’ “The Incredible Human Journey”, continue the tradition. Unfortunately in the last decade the rise of right-wing Christian fundamentalism and its insidious invention of “Intelligent Design” has begun to erode all the good work which has sought to enlighten and educate ordinary people. Read more…

Having witnessed the Police presence in Brighton today for the “Smash EDO” protest, which led me to have to drive a 10-mile diversion to deliver my girlfriend to work, I read with interest the statement issued by the Brighton & Hove City Commander, Chief Supt Graham Bartlett, as follows: Read more…

Incredible. This morning (about half an hour ago actually) I witnessed an Adur Council refuse collection vehicle being driven into my childrens’ school at we arrived. The driver was self-righteously waving away parents dropping their kids off at school as he drove the wrong way up a narrow road which everyone voluntarily treats as a one-way street, and tried to maneuvre the lorry into the narrow driveway. I stayed clear, allowing him to pass.

A few minutes later, Read more…

I love taking my shoes off at the end of a busy day. It’s the first thing I do when visiting my friends’ houses. But through the airport security, when I’m already being made to carry my outdoor coat, having removed everything from my pockets and decanted everything including drinking water and each of my many bodily fluids (blood, urine, sweat, semen and both vitreous and aqueous humours) into 100ml bottles sealed inside a transparent ziplock bag (or even worse, to dispose of them, never to be seen again), removing my boots is really the last straw. Read more…

0800 GMT: Yay it’s Christmas Day. I’m alone because my girlfriend is working today, and this year my sons are with their mum for Christmas day. I am going to make it a really good one. Read more…

Sometimes I have a negative experience dealing with a service provider. When I do, I tend to report it here, honestly and fairly. Of course I try to report the positives too, they just get a bit outnumbered. What I absolutely don’t do, however, is to accept offers of money or any other kind of remuneration to remove negative reports, or indeed post positive reports.

Please take note, especially the one (who shall remain anonymous) who contacted me offering me a substantial cash payment if I were to remove the report about them. Tsk. Shame on you. Integrity still counts for something round here you know.

£6 for a sandwich. No, this isn’t one of those posh sandwiches where you can hardly get your face around the thing which is held together with a cocktail stick with a chef’s hat on, where its gourmet credentials are incontrovertible and where the experience leaves you with a smile on your face for days. No, this is a £6 piece of crap. Where? Read more…

As Homer Simpson once said, “I know they’re all God’s creatures, but why did he have to make them all so tasty!?”.

I like eating dead animals. However they taste much better if they were happy animals during life. Read more…