It is late night in Brighton, and from my flat window I can hear one of the last trains crossing the ten million bricks of London Road viaduct.

Arriving back from Istanbul was a strange, jarring thing. I had only been in the city for five nights, but as always, had adapted quickly. Street cats, ferries, and endless glasses of Turkish tea: this was my new and permanent reality.

It was an honour to be at Bella and Kaan’s wedding, with its assorted boat trips and rooftop restaurants and hotel bars.

Bella’s world is an interesting one. Lots of “expats” – aka, white migrants – fleeing places like America to teach in international schools, and complaining that the salary isn’t what it was. But still, you don’t have to work three jobs to survive like back home.

“Living here, I don’t have to think about it any more,” one explained.

“You mean the politics? The state of the nation?”

“Yeah”.

Another person I meet is a Turkish-American, adopted soon after birth but pulled back to her motherland by some sense of identity and unfinished business, like the main character in Return to Seoul.

She’s going back to America, though. To buy land and start an anarchist commune, taking advantage of the tax free status of religion to start her own cult.

“It’s not a cult. I mean, it is, sort of. We’re playing them at their own game.”

Before we leave the city, we go in search of vegan cakes deep in the urban foreverland, and see a man who owns a plant shop closing up for the day by kicking out a street cat, closing the door, then returning shortly after to feed him.

—

The first thing you see once you’ve cleared customs at Luton Airport is a Marks and Spencer, and I bought myself a disappointing sandwich in an attempt to acclimatise. I ate this on the hard seat of a privatised train, phone sockets available in first class only, as my travelling companion tried to contact what remains of the NHS.

Turkey isn’t a particularly modern or functioning state, but it feels less like a place on the verge of collapse than England.

Brighton, though, is home.

The following day, I heard a prisoner banging from the inside of his Serco van all the way up the Olde Steine. The traffic was so bad, I overtook him, at walking pace, several times. Finally, on Ditchling Road, his outsourced chariot overtook me for the last time, as he thumped and yelled his way to some place of incarceration.

In the sauna, a seventeen year old lad with long hair tried to engage me in conversation. I closed my eyes, and he soon found someone else to talk at.

I listen to what he has to say, because I can’t zone these things out.

“She stabbed me in the back, bruv”.

It’s quite the story. He invited his girlfriend to live with him at his mum’s, after said girlfriend got kicked out of her own parents’ house for using drugs.

His own mum is a recovering addict; soon, she and the girlfriend are snorting coke together.

“And now I don’t speak to either of them, mate. They stabbed me in the back.”

The bloke he is talking to has remained largely silent, but at this he opens his eyes, and offers words of eternal wisdom.

“There’s plenty more fish in the sea”.