Brighton Pavilion

Despite a thorough search of Brighton’s shoreline I couldn’t find the Zap club. Apparently it closed down a few years ago. The West Pier burst into flames in 2003 and now looks like this:

The authorities want to turn it into a 183 m observation tower designed by the London Eye architects. Many of the locals do not approve.

Since Jessica's mother told me at breakfast that morning in December 1990 not to miss the Brighton Pavilion before returning to London, I’ve often felt I should honour that commitment, expressed over the eggs and the coffee, to visit properly; to see more than the outside.

So I did, and felt a circle close.

Actually, if I'd gone as instructed that morning; if I hadn't instead spent two hours writing theological notes in a hard-backed blue notebook in a forgotten cafe in the Lanes, who knows how my subsequent life might have been different.

Perhaps in our interior private narratives we all divide our lives according to specifically 'significant moments’, subjectively rendered; moments that have nothing to do with the offficial demarcations littering the public account of our lives -such as when we got our first job, owned our first car, graduated from University or bought our first house. All that Babylonian baloney, disastrously dull, existentially void as it is.

I don’t speak of those Semi-private moments we can share and relate to, moments such as when you first had a real snog, or a fag - if you did, or first got totally smashed; or when you lost your virginity or, more loftily, first fell in love, feeling the disabling hand of Eros upon you.

I mean those moments which while in themselves not constituting much - such as a decision not to visit a historical building - can, when situated in the context of the chain of events of which they form a part, assume a possibly epic importance, on account of the grand significance of what lies at the end of that chain: a life changing, life demarcating moment.

It is not that I totally regret the change that happened to me all those years ago; though nor do I entirely relish it. Something in me died that winter of 1990, something I miss and mourn, and would like to resurrect. Even though something else, entirely novel, was born and blossomed, breathing into me an ineffable splendour that took me by surprise.

My official CV is not much really, though I can boast it's pretty thin on lies (on marketed manipulation, if you’d prefer); but I think I might work on an official, alternative CV, charting the formally irrelevant, truly significant (for me anyway, from my perspective) modes and episodes of this existence which I happen to be embodying, for reasons I cannot recall. Why is it that all that we are is what we can be used for, by the world of work

By the world of generation

By the world of copulation and death.