For the past week I have been suffering from a pain in the neck. Not a person, but an actual pain in the neck. When a person is a pain in the neck, they’re not awful; they could be a lot worse. The pain in my neck was awful. Even not moving was painful. Moving my head was agony. Who knew you have to move your head so much? Sitting down to look at the screen and write was painful. In bed, it was a toss-up whether lying on the left side or the right side was worse. In order to shift position without howling, I had to cup the back of my head with one hand, and use that, instead of the neck muscles. There was a knack to it. As for looking up, that was right out of the question. I had a stockpile of strong dihydrocodeine pills and 500mg paracetamol prescribed to me because of my gallstones, and I was knocking them back like Smarties.
A long period without pain – is that too much to ask? My eldest messaged to say that they were coming down to Brighton with some gay bikers to see an exhibition about gay bikers. They were going to have lunch at Devil’s Dyke and asked if I would like to join them there and ride pillion on the way back. It was a nice day.
Ordinarily, I would have said yes. But the thing about riding a motorbike is a bit like the thing about being a pilot in wartime: you have to do an awful lot of looking around. Of course as a pillion you don’t have to look around as much as the driver does but I like to have full situational awareness, especially when the driver is my eldest child, and also, old habits die hard. (For I, too, once rode a motorbike, for years.) The thought of looking around a lot made me feel a bit faint.
“I’ll meet you at the museum,” I said. “Which one?”
“The Brighton Museum of Creativity,” they said.
Good to know: I didn’t want to go, thoughtlessly, to the big official Brighton Museum and stand there waiting like a lemon. The BM of C, I learned, is either a half-hour walk or a 15-minute bus ride from the Hove-l. I wasn’t up for a walk. The bus was painful enough: every time it stopped, or started, or hit a pothole, the agony in my neck flared up again. Which was more or less all the time. What was wrong with it? It was on the side, so I hadn’t snapped a vertebra. Can you get neck cancer? Whiplash? How? I don’t do sudden movement.
When I got off the bus, I was deeply in Hove. This, I realised, was the furthest west I’d been since moving to Brighton. I felt like Sam Gamgee leaving the Shire. Did people here have strange accents? Different words for bread rolls? The Museum of Creativity, a nice villa in an extremely boring-looking residential area, seemed like an odd place to have an exhibition about gay bikers. It looked very child-friendly. I went in the front door and then out again.
I got a message from the eldest. “We’ve parked here.” The pin on the WhatsApp map was directly next to the proper Brighton Museum, now more than two miles away.
“Well, I’m here.” I sent my location. “Wretched child.”
While waiting for the Uber the Eldest had graciously ordered to pick me up, I sat on the bench outside and had a smoke. In front of me was a construction called the Jaipur Gate, built for an exhibition about the colonies in London in 1886; 40 years later they shipped it to Hove. Inscribed on it, in English, Sanskrit and Latin, is the legend, “Where virtue is, there is victory.”
The Uber ride, though smooth, was also painful, through no fault of the driver’s. I was introduced to the gay bikers, who seemed perfectly nice. We walked around the museum, which had wokeness coming out the wazoo and there was an exhibition about gender attitudes through the ages that was quite good, although the fashion section had a Ben Sherman shirt with a print of the Beatles’ 1964 album A Hard Day’s Night. The information card next to it said the shirt was “inspired by the Beatles’ groundbreaking 1985 album Help!.” (Sic.) The exhibition about the gay bikers – a local group called the Sussex Lancers – was small but rather good, and at the end, moving: a list of the members who had died from Aids. But before then it was life-affirming. The bikers in the pictures drew heavily on the hyper-masculine aesthetic of the time: huge moustaches, leather everywhere, and bare, hairy chests. I looked at the group I was in. They didn’t look like that at all. I really wouldn’t have even guessed they were gay.
It was all very pleasant but my neck was beginning to hurt, so instead of joining them for a coffee I walked home. I wouldn’t have minded a pub but they were driving. (At the gender exhibition there was a contemporary painting of the interior of a gay pub in the 1930s. I pointed at it and said “Pub!” to the Eldest, in the way a toddler might look at a painting of an elephant and say “Elephant!” to its mother.)
There were two things I found remarkable about that Sunday. The first was how completely unirritated I was about the cock-up about the museums. And the second was that at about eight o’clock in the evening, my neck stopped hurting. What was all that about then?
[Further reading: Euphoria needs to grow up]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 15 Apr 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Angry Young Women
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment