I was supposed to be seeing The Divine Comedy this past evening [1]. They are one of my favourite bands, but I couldn’t quite face it.

The assorted gigs, shows and accompanying human interactions of the past week, joyous as they were, left me feeling like I needed to spend an evening somewhere other than in a boozy and sweaty room full of people.

So instead, I picked a direction – north – and started walking. It was a cool but beautifully clear night, and I thought if I walked uphill enough, I might be lucky enough to see the stars, and look back upon the twinkling lights of the city.

Traffic noise stresses me out – really, it stresses everyone out – so I travelled up side roads where possible, starting past the beautiful quiet of London Road station (which someone is lucky enough to live in), and the traffic calmed Southdown Avenue [2].

I then passed a sadly vandalised, roadside community garden. Someone had thrown an unidentified liquid on the patch, and killed all the chard, explained an understandably furious laminated sign. Passers by were advised to stay well back.

From here, I entered the reassuring cool of Blakers Park, its tennis courts dark and deserted, and its clock tower emitting a beguiling soft glow.

I easily resisted the charms of the Cleveland Arms. It looked warm and inviting, but if the gorgeous songs of Neil Hannon weren’t enough to lure me somewhere social, a local pub wasn’t going to cut the mustard either.

Instead, I headed further up and further in, as CS Lewis might have put it (while also making the second coming of Jesus palpable for kids and also explaining you’d be doomed to eternal torment if you discovered boys and makeup). [3]

The traffic is busier between the imposing and faded villas of Preston Drove, and I felt my metaphorical buttocks clenching as I approached Fiveways junction.

Like Seven Dials, Fiveways is now a desirable and aspirational neighbourhood full of posh parents and enormous SUVs. And also like Seven Dials, it is centred around a truly awful and confusing junction which seems designed to throw cars at you from every direction.

Gingerly I made my way across. As I reached the northern side, a Land Rover mounted the pavement directly in front of me, as the driver needed to get to the Co-Op, couldn’t possibly park any further away from it, as his life is more important than other people’s, and anyway double yellow lines are merely ritualistic nowadays, like crosses or the modern beer mat.

I pass a doomed chip shop, then an old-fashioned bakery next to a posh, aspirational one.

The traffic quietened and my heartbeat returned to normal as I headed higher up Ditchling Road. There’s less traffic past the turn-off to Hollingbury, and we approach the golf course and the official start of the National Park.

First, though, I stop to gawp at the gorgeous St Matthias church – definitely C of E in that most solid and suburban of styles. According to their website, their curate is called Kate Middleton, and their Discovery Group offers “an intentional space for the spirit to move through scripture, our conversations and dessert!”. [4]

Brighton begins to open up behind me.

Around this point I started daydreaming about Ditchling Road not being a through road from here on up. After all, cars have plenty of other routes via which to join the traffic jams of the A27.

Unlikely, I know. But you’ve got to dream of a better future sometimes. I imagine this filled with cyclists, wheelers and walkers, the golf course rewilded, orchards everywhere, and fuck it, maybe a monorail all the way up to Ditchling Beacon. And being back the Devil’s Dyke funicular while we’re at it.

Back in reality, I see the light of the caravans and motor homes that cluster here and at all of Brighton’s rural edges. I think of the housing crisis and our establishment’s appalling scapegoating of migrants, and the darker times that lie ahead unless we change course, and change course quickly.

From up here, the whole city is your jewellery box. You’re up above the lights, and the loneliness, and all those other lives going on down there, in the valley below.

Arguments, cuddles, bedtime rituals, shagging (if we’re lucky), doing the washing up, doom scrolling. Last breaths and first kicks. Slow realisations and brutal revelations. Number 17 is going to order a takeaway. They can’t be arsed cooking and the weekend is almost here.

I descended through Stanmer Heights into the desolation of Hollingbury Asda. This retail park on the edge of town is dug out of the chalk. From above it looks like the end of the world, and doesn’t look any better up close.

My pedestrian path, down, down, deeper and down, passed behind Bestway Brighton, a wholesaler, and a kissing gate which leads to nowhere in particular.

Finally, I was at my accidental destination. The big Asda on the edge of town. The lurid green sign called to me, and the surface level car park seems to stretch on forever.

I stopped to photograph this architecture of American postwar dreams and nightmares. While I was doing this, a man in a BMW gestured me over with some enthusiastic hand movements.

I didn’t think I was the man he was after. I also wasn’t in a hurry. I walked up to him, and he wound down the window a crack, and peered out at me.

“You’re looking for Sonny, yeah?”

Is this a euphemism? “No.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m very sure.”

I turned away, and headed into the painful artificial light of the Asda and the even more painful sound of The Kaiser Chiefs on the in-store radio.

[1] It’s fine – I’m seeing them next month, with friends, rather than alone.

[2] Round Hill would make a superb Low Traffic Neighbourhood, if the council was ever brave enough to ignore the reactionaries and the fascists and stick one in.

[3] Here I’m referencing The Last Battle, the truly terrifying final Narnia book where Aslan / Jesus comes back and everyone dies in a train crash. Except Susan, but darker things await her, for she is “no longer a friend of Narnia”.

[4] No mockery here. I’m always fascinated by the language used by people of faith, but these seem like good people.