Salad dodgers delight

Briefly, as I awoke, there was a break in the gloom but by 11am it was grey again. My work with Currencies Direct complete for the day, I was washed, showered and shaved ready for the trip to Brighton. There is some irony in the name of the town hosting Quartermains Terms being called Brighton in the current weather climate. Greystoke would have been more apt, or Blackfriars, but I decided to make the best if it,

We arrived in Brighton early, in time for a pint at the White Rabbit with Gill from Ditto Fabrics, the iconic material store situated in Kensington Gardens in the town and now a satisfied Currencies Direct client. Also there was another old school friend of That Nice Lady Decorator, with whom she had shared a room for many of her formative years at school somewhere up north. What she did not know, until it was announced in a conversation in the pub, was that her friend was gay. This in itself, in Brighton, the gay capital of the south, should not have been a surprise, but what was a surprise was that Nice Lady Decorators comment straight after this bombshell, when talking about dealing with her friend adapting to her new life in the gay fraternity. She said “Well, you just have to dive in to make the best of things”. I must say here that my flabber was gasted.

Now I am not a prude, and have also been known to be careless with language in the past, a fact with which regular readers will concur, but this seemed to me to be going down to new depths. I was just waiting for her to say something about having life licked, but had she done so I cannot possibly have carried on.

Escaping from The White Rabbit we looked around for somewhere to eat and hit upon a Japanese fast food outlet called, I think, Popero a very reasonable and bustling “bring your own” unlicensed restaurant, rescued by a swift purchase of a bottle if wine from nearby Tesco. On the way there I marvelled at some of the interesting and quirky retail outlets nestling in this buzzy area, from where I took this picture.

Shoes that don’t eat meat

Vegetarian shoes, but how can you be sure? I mean does someone keep an eye on them throughout their lives to ensure they never waver and become salad dodgers? What happens after you have bought then? Are you responsible for keeping them on their diet? It is all very mystifying.

It took some time to rediscover my composure before entering (there I go again) the Theatre Royal in Brighton to witness Rowan Atkinson’s first stage appearance in some 25 years. In the interim he has found fame in the UK TV world as Blackadder, world-wide fame as Mr Bean and become a rival to James Bond as Johnny English, so hopes were high that Quartermaines Terms was going to be something special and it was, but not in the way I had expected. I had not expected to doze off after the first half hour, utterly bored by a dreary script, a terrible play and a totally uninspiring performance from one of our great comedians. Whoever advised him to take on the part of a dozy school teacher suffering from the onset of Alzheimer’s was as deluded as most of its sufferers. A diabolical waste of a great mans talents. The rest of the cast did their best to rescue the whole thing, but without success.

To cap it all, it was raining when our chauffeur arrived to collect us, which added a new horror dimension to a horror strewn evening, which apart from the play, I enjoyed enormously, with particular emphasis on the diving faux pas from earlier. .

Chris France
@Valbonne_News