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Correspondents diaryBy the West PierOur Obituaries Editors diary Jul 19th 2010 | BRIGHTON Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | ThursdayFriday LIVING by the sea inspires two different sorts of behaviour. The first is that you notice the sea all the time. The second is that you cease to notice it, or fear it.On the one hand, the sea dominates everything. First thing in the morning, even before I listen to the news, I check on the seas mood and colour and the texture of the waves. They are never remotely the same from one day to the next. The rippling, variegated strips of green light and blue shade may be replaced with deep purples, pale pinks, a grey dark as pewter or a greenish beige, like sand. The horizon is sharp as a ruler or may disappear, the sky inverting the sea. The waves thrash and smash against the jetties (whoever thought the Channel was a calm sea?), lie stippled and scumbled like the skin of a beast, gather all over like ruched silk, or pulsate, no more, beneath an untroubled sky. South-westerlies outrage the sea, but under north-easterlies it labours to move, with tide and wind negating each other. Every cloud in the heavens also sails, in fragments, in the sea. The seas vast, uncompromising light gets in everywhere. It fades the pictures, bleaches out the curtains, and falls unsparingly on driftwood and part-painted furni,ture as advertised in Coast magazine. It rots the window frames, cakes the panes with salt, and corrodes anything metal down to brown, bleeding rust. Cartloads of shingle are flung across the promenade in winter. The grand Regency terraces of Brighton need painting every other year as the sea eats away at the stucco, and even the seagulls specialise in a form of salty shit that digs into the gloss of cars. Even several miles away from it, even on calm days, I lick the salt from my lips. Yet as all this work of erosion and destruction goes on, its strange how I also forget the sea. Above the noise of traffic you dont hear it from the cliff-top, except on the wildest winter days. The chorus of dawn birds is louder. So silent and constant is the presence of the sea that I may go most of a day without observing it, or even registering that it is there. It is hypnotic and inescapable, yet I push it to a corner of my mind. I consider, but dont dwell on, its mysterious connections with us in its chemical composition, its pulses and its tides. I sit beside it, reading or drinking my coffee, as though it is some sort of tamed, predictable animal that has no closer connection with me.In one of Charles Dickenss most sentimental scenes, the old coachman Barkis in “David Copperfield” delays his dying while the sea is full and coming onshore, but eventually “goes out with the tide”. Fishermens folklore, Dickens writes, says men and women cannot die while the tide is rising. Victorian mawkishness, we say. Yet we know that life came out of the sea, as the first peculiar living forms flopped out, and gasped in air, on such a beach as this. And isnt there also that faint feeling, as we run shrieking in and out of it, or defy its inexorable surge with our pitiful fusillades of stones, that death too, quite naturally, rides in and out with the sea? Thursday HALF a mile west of Brightons jolly Palace Pier, the skeleton of the old West Pier stands in the sea. It was once the most beautiful pier in the land, built by the great Eugenius Birch in 1866, with white kiosks and pavilions of lacy wrought iron stretching out into the Channel, and fashionable couples strolling. It is still Grade-1 listed, of the highest architectural interest, the only pier in Britain to be so. But it has had a cruel history. Neglect, dilapidation, storm and fire have gradually reduced it to a rusting hulk, like the rib-cage of a whale. One of the last parts to go, in February, was once the concert hall. On moonlit nights, when the pier is silhouetted against the glittering water, the ghost-sounds of a Palm Court orchestra seem to lilt across the waves. In razzy, cheery Brighton, with its crowds of tottering hen-night girls and tattooed, tanked-up young men, with its throat-catching smells of candy-floss and chip-oil, with its bandstands and whizzing windmills and cacophonous diving gulls, it seems odd to preserve a dead thing. This is not a place for ruins. Other parts of England, such as Cornwall or the North York Moors, seem ideally suited for toppling, roofless piles, for old chimneys or for cloisters occupied by birds. Any dreamy, pen-chewing poet would feel at home there, musing on mortality. Brighton is a place for jugglers, unicycles, roundabouts, and flying up from giant trampolines into the wild, music-booming sky. Some people, of course, would like to see the old pier go. But most treasure it. They sit beside it companionably, as if at a wake; the old skeleton seems to impose a philosophical quiet. Artists paint it, in as many moods as there are shades in the sky. They fish by it, because the silver-flicking mackerel come there in dense shoals, feeding on the funeral weeds that hang among the girders. They take each others photographs on mobile phones, grinning, thumbs-up life beside death. At very low tides they scramble dangerously round the exposed, rusting bones. Under the arches beneath the promenade lie more remains in a sort of graveyard: acanthus-topped columns, iron railings with heads of Poseidon, bits and pieces of sculpted dolphins, all implying that the Victorians controlled the sea as boldly as the rest of the empire, until the storms came. Every so often a scheme comes up for the wholesale revamping of this part of the seafront. The latest is a tall, slim observation tower at the piers foot from which to survey the city from every angle. But the citizens of Brighton do not want things too much tidied up or modernised. If the tower is built, as it seems now it will be, they want to look out from its sleek steel verandas at the crumbling, familiar cage, crouching below. At sunset the pier becomes a work of art, as insubstantial as a barred cloud floating on the fiery waves. In winter thousands of starlings perform their murmurations round it, banking swiftly and silently in vast helices across the sky. Lying out there, the pier makes a momento mori, like a black-bordered brooch that flatters the citys plump, garrulous, sun-burned throat. And as long as it remains, blatant in its disintegration, there also remains the possibility that it may one day, somehow, rise again. Wednesday TO WANDER on the Downs is inevitably to walk with ghosts. The land has been shaped by men and women as much as by Nature. Quarries, tumuli and terraces mark it all over, before we even consider the furrows and radio masts of the present day. As I lie in the shelter of a burial mound, out of the bitter wind (as two tangle-fleeced sheep have discovered before me), the shades of Neolithic worshippers creep through the grass. The sheep thud away, but the ghosts remain. Ancient humans liked the view of the sea from here, and the sudden warmth of the sun, as I do. Fragments of their cutting tools still lie in the chalk, and they grew thin crops here, not seeming to care how much more fertile the valleys were. Their broad, ugly, kindly faces watch in the sunlight as I write, and their breathing is quiet under the hill.Rest-harrow and ladies-slipper grow in the turf here. These too summon up ghosts, this time medieval ones: the peasant laying down his wooden machine and flopping down himself, running with sweat on a spring day as the thin, hard earth breaks up in flints, swigging from the flask at his waist, or sheltering under his cloak from the thin spring rain; or the yellow-slippered girl, in a green gown and with loose hair, running up here alone. Speedwell is their flower too, with its blue like a song of cheer, and so is eyebright, which clears away the dust of travel. Wherever these grow there is a sense of people journeying. They have passed here, and they are hardly any distance aheadif I run, I will catch up with them, before they disappear into the wood. The deep banked path from Woodingdean to Lewes, called Juggs Lane, has the noisiest ghosts. There I trail after 19th-century fish-wives, in pattens and tucked-up skirts, carrying herring and mackerel from Brighton to the towns inland. (“Jugs” was the Lewes slang for Brighton folk.) They tell bawdy Chaucerian tales, and show their crooked, gappy teeth like horses when they laugh. If it rains, their shoes slip on the chalk, as mine do, and I take their recommendation to walk where the gravelly stones have been washed down, deepening the track in their wake. When I pick blackberries on the path under Kingston Ridge they pick with me, their tanned, sinewy arms oblivious to scratches, their laughing mouths purple with juice. They walk the eight miles, and walk them back, with no option of catching the bus at one end of the journey: just a pause for a drink of beer, a readjustment of hairpins and a hitch of fishy stockings, the empty baskets now light on their shoulders, before they must return again. Modern walkers pass me on these paths, too, with mountainous backpacks and bedrolls, their noses buried in maps. They wish me a good afternoon, and imagine they have lightened my solitary state. So they have; but I walkas I often walkin a flickering press of the still-vivid dead, and the buzz of their words. Tuesday ON THE beach or on my walks I like to travel light. I take the smallest possible knapsack, containing a map, a notebook, money, a pen, a pencil in case the pen lets me down, plasters for blisters, my door-keys. And a shell. Todays is a dark blue snail-shell, spiralled and chequered with paler blue and purple, picked up somewhere on the Downs. At other times Ive travelled with whelk or periwinkle shells, found usually at Hope Cove near the Seven Sisters, where theres a rare staircase down to a cramped beach backed with towers of chalk and littered with giant white cubes of it. The pocket of my favourite walking jacket conceals in its lining the tiny, white, paper-thin shell of some chalk-dwelling snail, picked out on Seaford Head from hundreds of others among the sheepsbit scabious and thyme.I carry shells for the feel of them: their lightness, smoothness and dryness, like a totem to be touched as I walk. I love their perfect spirals flowing comfortably out and round from the raised central point, end to beginning and beginning to end. It is astonishing that such beauty should be scattered as prodigally as ordinary clods and stones. Such wonders should not be thrown away like this. “When we have shuffled off this mortal coil”, Hamlet says, and apparently he means the turmoil of the world; but I always think of “coil” as something between one of these shells, and the skin of a snake. These little mortal coils lie everywhere, scrunching under my boots.Yet they are not entirely empty to me. The earth enters them, and the wind fills them. The music of tiny shells is not exactly audible, but I imagine it as a deeper amplification of all the sounds around me: breeze, waves, skylarks, encapsulated in this curving ear as they are centred and grounded in mine. Whatever lived in these shells has long since disappeared, but there is still a sense of previous occupationby something perhaps more exotic and lovely than the slimy mollusk we occasionally disturb. Absence becomes presence, and an empty shell is a companion in a way a stone is not.What do we humans leave behind? Heavier coverings: rusting corrugated iron, broken-down walls, or at Hope Cove giant concrete blocks, mimicking the cliffs, whiskered with antique wire. We leave rumours of old wars, and long-forgotten fears of invasion by Frenchmen or Germans. We leave houseloads of old, dark furniture, matching sets, unwise buys. But we may also bequeath something light and beautiful, like a snails shell. The pencil I carry in my back-back is a silver-plated Eversharp with propelling leads, which my mother left in her drawer when she died. It bears her maiden name on the side. She was never without a pencil of some sort and, in her frugal way, used them until they were two-inch stubs, sharpening them carefully with a razor blade. But this one was the non-pareil, which never needed sharpening and would never break. It was her pride and joy. To carry it is to feel again that she walks with me, ready and practical, stepping out fast, and always quicker than me to spot the birds foot trefoil or the rock-roseor, nestling in some mouse-hole or tuft of grass, the perfect shell. Monday OBITUARIES editors probably belong by the sea. The cries of seagulls are their music, fading into infinity, and the light-filled sky bursts open like a gateway out of the world. The elderly gravitate there, shuffling in cheerful pairs along Marine Parade or jogging in slow motion past the Sea Gull Caf, intent on some distant goal. Their skin is weathered and tanned, as if they have fossilised themselves in ozone to keep death at bay. They wear bright trainers, young clothes. But they have shifted to the shore here, or in Bexhill, or in Eastbourne, as if to the edge of life, and each flapping deck-chair reserves a waiting-place. Among those deck-chairs, slammed out on the shingle by a yobbish pair of entrepreneurs (though they are meant to be free), a man moves in the morning with a grabber and a black bag. To the strains of old Motown songs from the waking-up pier, he is gathering litter. To the faraway eye he leaves the beach astonishingly clean, a homogeneous brown contrasting nicely with the aqua railings and the white stucco streets. Up close, though, all is different. Man-made fragments of all kinds still lie among the pebbles. They are sea-worn and tiny, but each one calls up a human scene. That four-inch piece of green plastic rope came from a fishing boat, probably attached to a lobster kreel, thrown overboard on some day when the sea was rough and the sou-westerlies were lashing the men in their soaked, slick rubber overalls. That blue cap came from a sun