Category Archives: Nicholas Lezard

Brighton Life, Nicholas Lezard

Nicholas Lezard – View From The Hill (June 2023)

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Do yourself a big favour and go to the Brighton Museum and see the exhibition of Roger Bamber’s photography. I’ve written about him before here: he was a friend, and he died last autumn. The exhibition has the splendid title “Out of the Ordinary”, which is beautifully double-edged, for he would turn settings that were ordinary and make them extraordinary. I wonder if this is why he moved to Brighton: because this is a town like no other, where surreal moments are a daily experience. (I was staying with him when the Grand was bombed in 1984, and, alerted by his News Desk, we raced down to be among the first on the scene. That might not have exactly been surreal, but it was certainly out of the ordinary.)

He was both a news photographer and a – what is the term? Art photographer? That doesn’t seem right, but his photographs are definitely art. I would tease him that his job only took him 1/250th of a second to do, but this was nonsense: he would set up his shots meticulously to get the right effect, often at great personal risk to himself. You look at his photo of men working on the Clifton Suspension Bridge and ask: hang on, how did he get up there? He would scorn safety harnesses, saying they got tangled up with his camera straps. There’s a photo of a microlight pilot achieving the world height record. Look at it without reading the caption next to it and it might not occur to you for a minute: this picture is taken from above.

He got along with everyone. The pop stars here include Freddie Mercury, Bowie, Mick Jagger, Suzi Quatro, but he also captured the working lives of railwaymen (he had a thing for steam trains), fringe performers, toy museum curators, the eccentric and the unusual. These latter he never mocked or ridiculed: he brought out their essence in a manner of pure celebration. He also had a thing for buses, and when he told the editor of Bus Times that his was the most boring magazine he’d ever seen, he followed this up with an offer to take the front cover photo for each issue, the condition being that he be allowed to borrow a bus for a day to get it into an unusual situation. Fittingly, there is a bus named after him now, as Brighton honours its best children: the 25, which takes you to the Amex Stadium.

Brighton was where his heart was. Come not just for the celebrity and news photos, but for the pictures of thew Fringe, the West Pier in flames, the seafront covered under a rare fall of snow. The people in it look like Lowry stick figures: the effect was deliberate. Few people has a way with a camera like Roger did. When his pictures were in the paper (which they were for decades; and he won numerous press photography awards), you could spot it was his from across the room.

Pic: credit © Roger Bamber/TopFoto

Nicholas Lezard

Nicholas Lezard – April-May 2023

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I write this at four o’clock; and I would like to go to Belchers for double egg and chips; but Belchers is shut. But thank goodness, it opens tomorrow; it just shut6s at two. Yet its survival is something of an anomaly; thank God it is still here.

As a Brighton resident, I get quite a few targeted ads to do with the place; as I imagine you do, too. The best one was for a tatty phone repair shop with branches in Kemptown and Preston Street; one of the comments beneath the ad was from a highly disappointed customer, which somehow added to the charm.

But the worst ad was the other day, and it was for “the twenty best restaurants in Brighton”. I scrolled through the list. The usual suspects: Riddler and Finns, the Salt Whatever It Is, you know the thing. Every photo was of a plate upon which lurked, shamefully, in portions so minuscule they were almost invisible, some confection of leaves and jus which you just knew that they cost, at a bare minimum, the thick end of twenty quid.

Now the best restaurant in Brighton is, as everybody knows, the Regency, which charges you about a half as much for its oysters as R & F. Why? They’re the same oysters. Its whitebait is a triumph. But there are times when you don’t want whitebait, however well-cooked; you want double egg and chips with a mug of dark brown tea, red and brown sauce bottles on the table. (Brown for me, thanks.) You also want it in a cafe that has been unchanged for decades; the kind of place that would not have looked out of place in an episode of, say, The Sweeney. Not that there is an undercurrent of violence in Belchers; indeed, the atmosphere inside is hushed, reverent, as people eat their all-day breakfasts and sip their tea. Right now, as I write, it is raining; I know that were it open, its windows, in its dining space the size of a small living room, would be slightly steamed up. (Ed: I’ve got to take you to Mac’s Cafe over Kemptown way. So old school there are Granadas and Capris parked – well, stopped – outside).

Belchers is now in its fifth decade, as is its proprietor and head chef, Jane. (Not that she looks it.) I don’t go there as often as I would like; in common with many these days, I have to watch the pennies. That said, six quid and change for a cup of tea and the double egg and chips is really not a bad deal.

It is, admittedly, a bit of a shlepp from West Hill; there was a decent cafe on Dyke Road but its food is now abominable. Beetroot has been involved. But Belchers is the true, the echt, the unimprovable. There’s a phrase used in the Michelin Guide, in which Belchers will never feature, for restaurants which are worth making an effort to go to: vaut le détour. Belchers falls very much into that category. 

Brighton Life, Nicholas Lezard

View From The Hill – Nicholas Lezard February 2023

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It’s a funny old thing, supporting a football team. The majority of supporters never set foot in the grounds of the clubs they support; many of them don’t even live in the same country. In their a heyday, a map of Man Utd’s fans would be properly global; and this was a cause for some taunting by others. 

The proper thing to do is to start at an early age and adopt the team nearest to you. For me, this meant Arsenal, although I was, as a North Londoner, unsure whether to support them or Spurs; a persuasive argument from the school bully when I was around six or seven helped to settle the matter: he put my head in the toilet bowl and threatened to flush it if I didn’t promise to support Arsenal for the rest of my life. As I was of an age to at least half-believe that flushing the bog would result in my joining the North London sewer system, I thought this a good enough deal; and as Arsenal won the Double next season, I in time became grateful to him. And, true to is word. He has never stuck my head down the toilet and flushed it ever again.

That said, I have been very pleased by Brighton’s success in the Premier League and FA Cup (so far) lately. At the moment of writing, they have beaten Liverpool in both, and as I once had a girlfriend who broke my heart terribly and also supported Liverpool, I give a little cheer whenever anyone beats them. Klopp may be a decent guy and Liverpool a team with a fine underlying philosophy, but, to paraphrase Gore Vidal on success and friends, it is not enough that Brighton should win; Liverpool must lose.

As it happens, the editor of this fine journal is a Spurs fan, and a serious one; so it would be unbecoming, and ungentlemanly, for me to mention the result of their most recent encounter (2-0 to Arsenal, playing away). He has his own cross to bear. Or, shall we say, his own cross to fail to score a goal with.

He has lived in Brighton for many years, and, like me, although he is happy for the team when they win, when his loyalties are tested he supports Spurs, as I support Arsenal when they play B&HA FC. That said, I am now entertaining a reverie in which the team is split in two, one side representing Brighton, the other Hove. 

How wonderful that would be! Imagine the derbies! Pitched battles on either side of Boundary Passage, effete Hovians being taunted to tears by mighty Brightonians, a Berlin-style wall being erected to keep an uneasy peace. The Hove side teased by images of tattoo parlours and interesting architecture and people actually having a good time. It would make Man U/Man C, or Liverpool/Everton rivalries look like walks in the park on a sunny day. It’s a long shot but one can dream.

Brighton Life, Features, Nicholas Lezard

Nicholas Lezard – December 2022

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I used to be a vain man but these days I do not gaze into the mirror admiringly any more, for there is now little to admire. So it is often an unwelcome surprise when I see my reflection when I walk into the lift at Waitrose. Instead of the dapper man iI imagine myself to be, I see an insane pensioner with hair all over the place. (Do not rebuke me for taking the lift at Waitrose. I have enough of a hill, and stairs, to climb once I get out.) What I need is a haircut; and every week this goes on the hair gets a little madder. Yesterday it looked so bad I wondered how they managed to let me stay in the shop. I know Brighton is a tolerant town but really?

There is a slight problem. Two, really. The first is that my favoured barbers is quite a shlepp away. This is for historical reasons. Five years ago, when I moved here, I went for a long stroll through the town – all the way to Kemp Town. I was much younger in those days. 

But as I was walking down St James’s Street I caught my reflection in a shop window and realised that it wasn’t Doc Brown from Back to the Future, but me, and I happened to be passing Ei8hty Ei8ght Barbers (for that is how they spell it, 88 being their address), and something about it looked welcoming, so in I went, and the barber available was Claudia, and she gave me – for the standard cost of a haircut for a gentleman – the best haircut I had ever had.

Of course, there is not much to cutting my hair. It’s pretty much a simple removal operation. I had a girlfriend during lockdown and after about a year my hair was going really lunatic so she borrowed a pair of clippers and it only took her two goes to master the technique. But there’s more to it than that and Claudia is still the best, and I can’t go anywhere else, it would feel like adultery.

But the thing is that Brighton has more hairdressers per square foot than anywhere else I have seen in my life. The only thing it has more of are tattoo parlours. But I am Brighton’s Amazing Untattooed Man so I can’t use them.

I typed “barbers brighton” on Google maps and there are 19 in a mile-wide radius from West Hill. There are three in a row in Seven Dials alone. After that they kind of peter out, but seriously, how many barbers/hairdressers can a town sustain? And it always feels odd, when walking from my place to Ei8hty Ei8ht, to have to pass about a dozen of them and go “No, not that one”, for I have to go there; it is the law. Anyway I can’t afford one today, not even at their reasonable prices. This magazine does not pay, we do it for love.