"He was born in the summer of his twenty-seventh year, going home to a place he'd never seen..." There have been two distinct periods when those words, from Rocky Mountain High by John Denver, rang so true of my own life that I found them difficult to get out of my head. The first actually was the summer of my twenty-seventh year, a summer which started with the arrival in my life of the beautiful woman who still illuminates it. The second was ten years on, the summer I moved to Brighton.
This time the words were out a decade on timing but still exact on feeling. I had been to Brighton before, of course. Every Londoner does at some point and many visit regularly. But the neighbourhood I was moving to, on the eastern edge of Kemp Town, I had visited only once before, on the wet February day when I viewed the flat. Even then it was beautiful but when I moved in it was June and the place looked infinitely different. The feeling it evoked took a while to define as I had not experienced it since early childhood. It was the feeling of being at home.
It was not that I had been desperately unhappy in the other places I had lived. All gave me something worthwhile. London, where I spent three decades, still makes me smile when I visit. Yet even London, where my parents were born and where I grew up, never quite gave me this feeling of rightness.
This is going to be a very personal view, the things that excite me about Brighton and especially about Kemp Town. Others have said enough about how to get here and the biggest attractions for visitors. I want to talk about my home and its hidden treasures.