Another sunny weekend, and Ben and I and his wife decide to go to the chippy on St James’s Street, Little Jack Fullers, which has been said to be the best chippy in Brighton. This is a bold claim, for Brighton abounds in fish-and-chip shops. I have promised to buy them all lunch in return for the countless number of times they have fed me.
Walk past the place with its neatly painted sign and bright-red window frames, and you might be forgiven for thinking that this is going to be one of those overpriced chippies with a sit-down at the back, but no, it is an honest chippy, and £30 fills us all to a bursting stupor and they are probably the best fish and chips I have ever eaten. I had suggested we eat them on the beach and then get a pint at a seafront pub. But it takes a special kind of stupid to imagine that you will find a square foot of beach, or a pub by the sea with less than a ten-minute wait time to be served; hoi polloi have arrived in their regiments, for it is a delightful Saturday afternoon. I keep forgetting that Brighton is like this on the weekend, for decades of freelance life have eroded the distinction between weekday and weekend. So we eat our f and c on the little chairs outside the restaurant and we are happy. I then suggest we go to a pub round the corner I know.
Here things went a bit weird. The landlady was colourfully coiffed and made up in a way which suggested the kind of broad tolerance for which Brighton is famous. But she took one look at us and, in a tone of voice which at first suggested she was joking, refused to serve us on the grounds that we had had enough already, especially Ben.
This was an outrage. Ben had only had one tin of San Miguel before lunch; his wife had even forbidden him wine, on the grounds that it made him grumpy. Well, he was grumpy now. We left the pub politely but outside, he seethed. Earlier in the week he had been telling me stories about Brummie Owl, a friend of his from the days when he was a football hooligan. (I have mentioned Ben’s sense of civic duty before in this column; back in the day, he considered one of his chief civic duties to be beating up Spurs fans.) Brummie Owl was back in town and suggested a meet-up. Ben said I should come along. After hearing about not only Brummie Owl’s talent for violence but his short temper, I said I was worried he might take an instant dislike to me.
“Just say you don’t follow football and only like cricket and rugby.”
“But I hate rugby.”
“All right, just say you’re not into any sport at all, and especially not any ball games.”
Anyway, as we left the pub in search of a pint, Ben kept muttering dark threats about the form his revenge was going to take. The recruitment of Brummie Owl played a large part in his fantasies of vengeance.
After a miserable walk trying to find a pub with a single seat in the sun – I was so full of chips I felt like fainting, never have I felt so weary – we had a thoughtful pint inside a not too crowded pub, but the joy had been sucked out of us and I went back to the Hove-l to lie down.
Later on I had a thought, and passed it on to Ben: “I think I know why that woman didn’t serve us. Consider how we looked. You with your Harrington jacket and Fred Perry shirt, and me in my tweed jacket and waistcoat and a fresh haircut and with dark glasses that make me look like Judge Doom from Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It is perhaps unfortunate that your Fred Perry shirt is in the colours that have since been adopted by the Proud Boys of America. She must have jumped to an unwarranted but forgivable conclusion. She was not to know that you are firmly on the centre-left and worship the noted columnist Rafael Behr so much you toy with the idea of kidnapping him so he can be your friend, like Rupert Pupkin, Robert De Niro’s character in Scorsese’s vastly underrated film The King of Comedy.”
And yet a funny thing happened to me later that evening – that time of night when a gentleman feels compelled to go to the all-night store and buy some Haribo Twin Snakes and a packet of Walkers Cheese and Onion French Fries (I had recovered from lunch). Outside the shop I fell into conversation with a group of about seven young men, I’d say a third of my age, all dressed in starkly modern clothing of the same colour – black – which suggested gang affiliation. I can’t remember how the conversation started because, um, it was late (the landlady would have been, by now, well within her rights to refuse me service, let me put it like that) and the talk turned to my outfit, unchanged from earlier in the day except now with a neckerchief. They fingered the jacket (Burton, older than me) reverently and expressed complete admiration and respect for my ensemble. There was not a trace of irony; indeed we went so far as to swap names and bump fists. I don’t know what that was all about but it certainly helped to cheer me up.
[See also: The dark side of the Moomins]
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This article appears in the 23 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Divide and Conquer