A Day at the Seaside: Part one

Brighton is officially my favourite English seaside town. Of course,this isn't difficult as Brighton is also the only English seaside town I have ever visited. We reached Brighton at 9am on Saturday morning. It was a relatively quick journey from Cambridge: taking around an hour to get to London's King Cross Station (we took a minor detour and had photos with Harry Potter's trolley to Platform 9 and 3/4 and theHogwarts Express - what a day trip that would have been!) and then just over an hour from London to Brighton.

It seemed that as we walked the streets into the town centre, Brighton was still asleep. Stores and street stalls were only just opening, and the visitors centre and various tourist attractions didn't open until 10am. First on the agenda was the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, which is located in the Royal Pavilion Gardens. The Museum/Art Gallery is an odd mixture of local history, period furniture and tribal costume.

The highlight for me was actually a special exhibit on an artist named Rex Whistler.I must admit, that generally when it comes to art I am more than slightly ignorant. However, I do know what I like and something about Rex Whistler's various works had me intrigued! He was an English artist who was part of the famous London society group of the '20s known as the'Bright Young Things', he seemed to be able to do it all - design theatre sets, illustrate books (his favourite work was the illustrations he did for the book Gullivers Travels) and paint murals for the Tate! All the pieces on display were full of detail, and his sense of humour seemed to shine through each work.

I became very attached to him as we wandered through the three rooms devoted to his life and was saddened to learn at the end of the exhibit that he died in 1944 aged 39 on his first day of combat in World War II. To think that he still had so much to offer the world, it makes you think that not only WWII but all the wars that there have been... that there still are, we lose thousands and thousands and thousands of people who have so much to give, and it all seems rather pointless.