Sea it differently ... bathers on Brighton beach. Photograph: Chris Ison
There's a track on Fatboy Slim's album You've Come a Long Way, Baby called You're Not from Brighton. If, like me, you live in Brighton, you'll find this completely hilarious. First, hardly anyone who lives in Brighton is actually from Brighton. It's a town of émigrés and runaways. Norman Cook grew up on the other side of the Downs in Reigate. But the line does sum up the Brightonian mindset. It's another country - we do things differently here.
It's something that Julie Burchill and Daniel Raven tackle in Made In Brighton - a very funny book that's based on a flawed premise. The subtitle is: "Modern Britain as seen from beside the sea." But people fall in love with Brighton precisely because its laid back and laissez-faire vibe makes it so completely unlike anywhere else in Britain.
I used to tell people I didn't think Julie Burchill actually had moved to Brighton in 1995. The place is such a small town you see its smattering of slebs out and about - Chris Eubank driving his bonkers truck down North Street, or even Sir Paul McCartney loitering outside the Queen's Road casino - but I'd never seen La Burchill pounding the streets. It turns out there was a reason for this; she says she never left her house for several years.
There is another reason - she's not from Brighton. No, it's not that she's one of those rich media whores from fancy London she says (correctly and in-no-way hypocritically) are ruining the city's good bad reputation. Julie Burchill lives in Hove. And as she points out, "Brighton and Hove" is a false construct. It became a unitary authority a decade ago, and won city status in 2001. But the two towns couldn't be more different. "It's as if the suburb which the Monkees sang about in Pleasant Valley Sunday had been slapped down right bang next to Sodom and Gomorrah," she writes, "Brighton young/Hove old, Brighton gay/Hove straight, Brighton hell-raising/Hove basket-hanging."
In Hove, every day is like Sunday. In Brighton, it's Saturday night forever. Hove is Kansas grey. Brighton is Oz in glorious Technicolor.
Even so, the wicked witch from the West Country has written a lovely little love letter to Sodom-on-sea. But Burchill being Burchill, I bet she'll leave before too long, and then start bitching Brighton to buggery. "It's the arsehole of England. Though thankfully, I lived in Hove, actually..."
