evidently chickentown

beautiful Bexhill on Sea

 

Mandy - catching a bit of sea air!

bought tickets to see the amazing, hilarious, punk poet of Salford John Cooper Clarke at Bexhill's  De La Warr Pavillion last night for my mate Mandy and i. the weather here has been glorious the last few days so we were thrilled to be spending a day at the seaside and left London with a spring in our step and excited to see the beautiful modernist architecture of the DLWP.

De La Warr Pavillion - shame about the building site outside!

still absolutely breathtaking inside...

 

this is just when we found out we would have to leave as soon as the gig started to get home in time!

sk8rs paradise outside the DLWP

  

the man himself was on top form and Bexhill and the DLWP were lovely - but getting there and back was a complete nightmare.  as there are no direct trains it took a tube and 2 trains to get there from Charing Cross via St Leonards (2 hours) but getting home was positively ridiculous. leaving Bexhill at 10, we changed trains at Brighton and should have ended up in London Bridge but having changed at Gatwick to get to Victoria instead and getting on and then being thrown off the Gatwick Express, followed by general cock ups and engineering works, we were stuck in the airport for over an hour and didn't make it into London until 2am, then had to get a taxi home as obviously all the tubes were shut - so it took 5 hours, 4 trains and a taxi in the end and we had, by then, lost the will to live!  we actually only saw Mr Clarke for 45 minutes!  we had briefly chatted to a couple of guys working at DLWP earlier, who laughed about us trying to get back to London tonight (while whistling the theme from Southern Comfort and joking about once in Bexhill, you'll never leave!) - we thought they were joking when they said we'd have to leave now (about 7.30pm) and change 3 times on the train - but clearly they weren't!

stranded in Gatwick Airport at 1am

i felt like Griffin Dunne in Martin Scorcese's 1985 After Hours about a hapless computer programmer who experiences the worst night of his life trying to get home from (and escape a variety of crazed residents of) the [at the time] trendy/kooky Soho area of NYC....it was quite laughable in the end really - in a hysterical kind of way - and of course JCC's famous poem "Evidently Chickentown" couldn't put it better....especially about the FOOKIN' TRAINS...enjoy!