Horsham Boys (And Girls)

Good Friday, I'm miles away....We travel to Sussex via a literally circuitous route: Canonbury to Willesden Junction to Clapham Junction to Horsham. The first thing we see is a giant, purple, open-top UKIP bus with no-one on it. We are entering enemy territory. We start off on the Downs link, an ex-railway line, now a rather gravelly path, where we go past bluebell woods, piebald lambs in fields, Christ's Hospital, and West Grinstead (I didn't know there was a west of Grinstead), where there is an old train carriage, with a model showing the railway before it was an ex-, then onto Partridge Green to eat chips in a beer garden.



We quit the railway path at Steyning to cycle through this pretty market town (sample local newspaper headline: "Llamas police rare ducks"), past Bramber castle, and then back on it to go through the Downs to Shoreham, which is the anti-Brighton: an olde fashioned seaside town with industry, boats, a sewage farm, and rotting hulks playing loud music; I like it.



In Brighton, we meet up with the others, and sit in pubs until it gets too late. Train back to Blackfriars, where we cycle through an empty, black City to Liverpool Street to catch the penultimate train home. We've done 32 miles and everything aches.