Someone's written this on the side of a council house in Hereford Street, just around the corner from me...


It says:

When the shadow of the grasshopper falls across the trail of the field mouse on green and slimey grass as a red sun rises above the western horizon silhouetting a gaunt and tautly muscled Indian warrior perched with bow and arrow cocked and aimed straight at you, it's time for another martini.

At least, that's what it's meant to say. I think the author's fountain pen leaked on the right hand side. Personally I assumed it was just a load of incoherent gibberish from someone with mental health problems, but apparently not. A quick consultation with Mr Google reveals that it was inspired by a mural painted on the wall of a bar called Vesuvio in San Francisco. The original looks like this...


Personally I prefer the Brighton version. We can't spell horizon, and have an aversion to the word green. I think that sums us up nicely.

Anyhoo, I took that photo (the first one) this morning whilst out on a walk with Amelie. We're planning a picnic for this afternoon, so I was out checking the price of umbrellas. As it turned out, we stumbled into some kind of 'situation' in the town centre. We'd just headed into New Road (click here if you can't picture the scene - that's me in the denim jacket), and were immediately overtaken by a police car with sirens wailing. It joined another one which was already parked outside the Theatre Royal, where a copper was attempting to calm down a slightly distraught lady.

I walked on, only to meet another police car coming from the other direction. At which point the cops started closing the road and asking everyone to leave. I thought it was a slightly heavy-handed response to a woman with PMT, but as I evacuated Amelie to the other end of the street, two fire engines came screaming around the corner, almost ran us over, and stopped outside the theatre. I'd have taken photos, but frankly there were more sirens than a second world war air raid, and I was worried about Amelie's eardrums.

So I'm not sure what all the fuss was about. Either someone was threatening to throw themselves from the front row of the upper circle after a bad review, or it was just another actor's career going up in smoke.