Friday in Rye

The train line from Brighton to Ashford may not be one of the great railway journeys of the world, but it is quietly impressive, passing thorough the South Downs before hugging the coastline between Eastbourne and Hastings. Given the final station, it is definitely better to travel than arrive.

Last Friday I boarded a train to Rye, where I'd arranged to meet an old schoolfriend. I was looking forward to the journey and congratualted myself when I found an empty table seat by the window, but then I was joined by this man:

I'd seen him minutes earlier, sprawled horizontally across a bench. He was in his 60s, with a distinctive leather trilby and a shirt that was unbuttoned down to the navel. If I'd had any sense, I wouldn't have picked the one seat in the carriage where he could assume a similar position.

At first he seemed harmless enough, nodding off within seconds of leaving Lewes. A few people glanced nervously in our direction and I felt slightly superior for not being fazed by my companion. What was their problem? He was just a harmless old drunk, looking for a nice comfy seat.

We arrived at Eastbourne and a speaker announced: "BING BONG. THIS IS EASTBOURNE. WE ARE NOW AT EASTBOURNE. PLEASE CHANGE HERE FOR..." At which point my companion suddenly bolted upright, as if he'd received an electric shock:

"Eastbourne? I want Ashford. There are THOUSANDS in Ashford. Thousands. I don't 'ave to worry. Ah'll be alright. Ah've got money and there's more in Ashford." I couldn't tell who he was talking to, but years of listening to ruddy-faced men who stank of rum had taught to avoid eye contact at all costs.

"D'you smoke?" It was a direct question. I couldn't just ignore him. I remember a man in London asking me the same question years ago and when I explained that I'd just given up, he shouted "I asked for a cigarette, not your fucking life story!"

I said no. He stared for a few seconds and announced "I smoke green weed. Green weed." I barely acknowledged him and returned to my newspaper, hoping that my companion would go back to sleep, but he had other ideas.

On the opposite seats were a teenage girl and boy. The girl had one of the most absurdly posh faces that I've ever seen, with a long nose and small, pouty lips, like a young Penelope Keith. It was a face that said "Cripes, I hear old Squeaky Dawson's been drummed out of the lacrosse team!" It was not the sort of face that would endear itself to my companion. He stared at her.

"I don't like you. I don't like you at all." Now he was becoming a nuisance.

"I don't mind...errr...hmmm...errr...yeah, but paedophiles...PAEDOPHILES! I'd shoot 'em. BANG! With a shotgun. Fuck 'em. Whoops. Sorry. can't say that."

At this point he spat on the seat, narrowly missing me. His eyes closed for a few seconds, then he suddenly leant forward and looked accusingly at me.

"Paaeedddophiles..." He gurgled like Gollum and started to retch. I didn't have a change of clothes, so changing seats was probably the best course of action, but the stubborn part of me refused to move and like an idiot, I subjected myself to a further 20 minutes of madness

Half an hour later, I was in the beer garden of The George in Rye, drinking a pint of Harvey's, getting slowly sunburned. I have know my friend since I was 12 and in some ways we have led parallel lives, growing up as cuckoos in the nests of working class families. Our parents didn't understand how they'd given birth to sons who liked classical music and had an absurd interest in European royalty, but to their credit they encouraged us.

In my friend's case, when he started drawing pictures of violins at the age of five, his parents responded by arranging for him to have music lessons. They weren't pushy, upwardly-mobile parents. Indeed, their idea of a good night out was playing darts at the British Legion, but perhaps they'd had thwarted ambitions in their youth and didn't want to repeat history. My friend ended up being taught by someone who'd trained with Joachim, who was a friend of Brahms.

His parents did everything they could to encourage their son's talent. On a caravan holiday in Hayling Island, the whole family dutifully sat through a live broadcast of Schoenberg's Survivor from Warsaw, oblivious to the fact that it had nothing to do with the violin repertoire.

My friend began a music degree, but he found his fellow music students too insular. When he met some students from the Yehudi Menuin School who didn't know who the leader of the Labour Party was, he quit and started a BSc in Sociology. When he graduated, my friend stumbled into business publishing and within seven years, he was earning a basic salary of £40,000.

At this point my friend went through a crisis. He'd blagged his way into a job that he had no interest or expertise in and to his surprise, he kept getting promoted. With each promotion, he felt increasingly unreal and was depressed by the ease with which he could pretend to be something he wasn't.

One day, my friend handed in his notice. Next, he sold his flat in Twickenham for £120,000, paid off his mortgage and bought another flat in Kent for £60,000. Since then, he has earned a living by playing the fiddle in bands at folk festivals. He is happy.

For those of us who don't have Grade 8 violin and 50% equity on our property, life can be rather more challenging, but the principal remains the same. Do we risk pursuing happiness at the possible expense of hard-won achievements, or should we be grateful for what we have?

What We've Lost

The Sussex accent is virtually dead. It has been replaced by a fairly nondescript "Estuary" accent that can be heard anywhere within a 60-mile radius of London.

Occasionally I hear a rural burr from some of the older people in town, but it's nothing like this wonderful recording from 1959. Click on the John Nash picture below to visit a page featuring Harry Burgess of Firle:

The British Library's National Sound archive is a wonderful resource, with recordings that include Tennyson, Florence Nightingale and Arthur Conan Doyle. But my favourite part of the archive is a collection of recordings of accents and dialects, arranged by county.

Another favourite of mine is this one from the Isle of Wight. Mrs Sheath has a wonderfully rich voice and if you listen carefully, you can hear a clock gently ticking in the background. As for this accent, it might as well be in another language.

Television, cars and people like me have all helped to erode local identities and sadly, we will never hear a voice like Harry Burgess's again. Thank God someone had the foresight to record these accents just before they disappeared.

John Nash

I found a book today called Men and the Fields by Adrian Bell, published in 1939, with lithographs by Paul Nash's younger brother, John. These illustrations may not have the visionary genius of Nash Major, but they are an important relic of a movement that included the wonderful Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden.

These artists reclaimed the English countryside from the platitudes of lesser artists and their vision of the pastoral is a more challenging one, imbued with a mysticism that harkens back to William Blake.

On the subject of platitudes, that's enough amateur art criticism from me. Enjoy John Nash:

Solitude

On Sunday, in the early hours of the morning, Britain came loose from its moorings and started drifting towards the Mediterranean. I know this is true, because the sea became azure, with barely a wave in sight. Normally, it is a greeny-grey colour, with veins of corporate sewerage and disturbed mudflats, but yesterday I was forced to say the word azure for the first time. Nothing else would do.

My car said that the temperature was 32 degrees, but it is foreign built and seems to have its own microclimate based on continental weather patterns, so that in winter the reading plunges down to minus ten and beyond. I'm sure that it wasn't hotter than 23.

We decided to drive to Birling Gap, a typically pebbly Sussex beach that redeems itself with sand and rockpools at low tide. It was reasonably crowded, but I wasn't bothered. Once, a beach was synonymous with quietude and my idea of bliss was to lie down and listen to the waves, but in the post-children world, my ambitions are broken. If nobody drowns or gets lost, then it's a good day out.

The other people on the beach seemed to be mostly families but there were also quite a few young Eastern Europeans, possibly landlocked, in search of an end to things.

I looked at the other parents. There were many men with tattoos, beer bellies and small breasts, whose feral appearance belied their tenderness with their children. There were also middle-class couples who all wore sunhats and sensible clothes, dishing out fresh fruit for lunch ("Who wants some melon?" "Me, me, me!"). Where did I fit into it all?

When I was planning the trip, I envisaged a montage of happy memories with me in the starring role as the fun dad. But I was rubbish. I complained when my oldest son kicked sand all over me, felt profoundly bored when we were paddling in sea and got frustrated when nobody seemed willing to look at a rock pool for more than two seconds.

I was tired. I'd had a difficult week and although I thought I'd successfully compartmentalised the crappy bits of my life, it was increasingly clear that I hadn't. I decided to go for a walk.

Amazingly, it only took less than a quarter of an hour of scrambling over boulders and wading through rockpools before I was completely alone. You would think that a beach that is in one of the most densely-populated parts of England would be completely packed on this, the first hot weekend of the year, but instead I felt like Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes.

I walked eastwards along a wave cut platform. In the distance, Beachy Head lighthouse looked like a child's toy against the huge chalk cliffs. You can barely see it in this picture:

I wanted to keep walking until I reached the lighthouse, but there was something slightly unnerving about being alone on a beach where the tide was coming in. The waves barely made a sound, but like the angels in Doctor Who, every time I turned around they seemed closer. I remained where I was, enjoying the microcosms of the rock pools.

When the tide comes in, the beach disappears and it was disconcerting being completely alone in this transient landscape, as if I was at the end of things. It seemed so strange that there was no evidence of the human world, even though it was less than a mile away. But I was also grateful for the herd instinct that makes most people huddle together, leaving wide open spaces for those of us that need them.

During moments like these, I find it hard not to look back at my life and wonder what I've achieved, but that way madness lies.

I started walking back and was surprised to feel a sense of relief when I saw people again. A group of Russians were picnicking on some huge, limestone boulders that looked as if they had been arranged like seats. Further on, a rather suspicious-looking man in his late 50s sat alone, taking pictures of people on a camera with a very long zoom lens. I watched his camera follow the path of two adolescent girls in bikinis and wondered if I was jumping to conclusions about his motivation.

In the distance, I saw my sons playing a ball game with my wife and her friend. They looked happy and relaxed, with the glow of people who had been outdoors for a few hours. Earlier I'd been wondering what I had achieved in my life.

Here was the answer.