One Night In Brighton
Completing the ‘who are we’ posts is this summary of the Brighton-based dConstruct conference in September 2006. Specifically, the events that occured while not sat in the auditorium.
It is a humble ode to Brighton, beer and general merriment…
Intro
Following an invite from native Brighton-ite Chris, I made the hefty journey down from Yorkshire on the Thursday afternoon - and was privelleged enough to discover first hand why the M25 is called “London’s carpark”. I might also add that I was not inconsiderably alarmed at how much the M25 actually vibrates when you are at standstill…
To cheekily skip forward in time, my duration in Brighton was magnificent from start to finish, and I left completely in love with the city. Far from a friend’s assessment of “that city of chavs & puffs”, I found Brighton to be full of lovely people, beautiful architecture and a very chilled atmosphere. And chavs and puffs - but more on them later. To be fair, when you live in Yorkshire it is easy to be impressed - the only time I’ve felt part of a liberal scene or, for that matter, been surprised on a night out was when we inadvertently wandered into a drag club… in Barnsley. (Mind you, in Barnsley there has always been a fine line between the men and the women…).
Leading Up to the Conference
Prior to the pre-conference drinks, I had wondered how we might find the venue and spot the other delegates. Clearly, this concern was very naive - the venue was the only completely black building in Brighton and the it turns out it’s surprisingly easy to spot delegates at a tech convention! Despite initial fears, the pre drinks were very much worth it and afforded Chris & I a good introduction to some great folks (notably James, Stuart, Toby, Tom & Adam).
My one & only grumble with Brighton is health food. Bloody health food. However, before 9am it seems it is only the hippies that have the wherewithall to actually open their cafes. Clearly the meat eaters craving grease are too hung over from the night before to fire up their ovens. We suffered.
The dConstruct 2006 Conference
All round a good set of speakers. It was interesting to see the sheer scope of what Amazon is doing - they’ve clearly got some mileage to do before the world realises they’re much more than a book store - but at the same time a sales brochure could have sufficed…
Notable props to Jeremy Keith for taking what could have been a dry subject and completely winning me over; and to Jeff Veen for the days superbly charismatic performance.
The divisive speeches were accessibility & tagging. Personally I simply could not muster enthusiasm for the material presented on accessibility, despite liking Derek’s work; but appreciated Thomas’s tagging talk because, well, I like that sort of thing. It seems some people were the complete inverse.
The Drinks
Sadly, due to a notorious lack of navigational ability, I bore witness to most of Brighton before I reached the Terraces. Thus, I missed the free bar (although I gather blinking would have had the same effect…), but did arrive in time to see the poor young ladies be completely swamped by the delegates. I imagine they’re in line for some kind of bonus after that.
Crazy Golf is about as joyous as crazy golf can be, and educated me on several important facts:
- Lee & I lack severe golfing stamina. After a very Tiger-eqsue opening we simply got bored. This explains our poor scores (no really…)
- Tom is alarmingly competitive. This was in no small part due to the fact he’d set himself up to a level of expectation that a native of St. Andrews could barely satisfy. Not only had he posted pics to his blog of his rigorous training schedule, he had won a prize for stating “I am going to smash my competitors to pieces” in Morse code
Sadly, he had not counted on David actually having played crazy golf before… - Simply belting the ball with all your power is stunningly ineffective.
Wandering back from the Crazy Golf we were introduced to Brighton’s chav culture. Noisy, drunk and frankly uninhibited 14 year old girls. Tom, in a supposed “accident”, had left his dConstruct pass around his neck. Clearly reading is not a strong point among 14 year old girls; and they presumed he was a member of the press - heat magazine to be precise. Tom, to his complete bewilderment, found out just how ambitious 14 year old girls can be when presented with an opportunity to be in heat magazine… (I might add that at this time, I was desperately pretending to be taking a phone call to get past unscathed, the phrase of the moment being “every man for himself”).
We later discovered that their presumption about heat was not as abstract as first though - Sheila had previously informed them that she was precisely that in an effort to scare them away. Thank you Sheila.
Back in the Terraces and for reasons I can now not remember, I ended up in an arm wrestle with Tom (something about Macs, Steve Jobs and Brighton culture…). Now, this was a mistake on many levels, not least for the fact that Tom is something of a martial artist. I was not destined to win, and all I could muster was a very drawn out loss. This is where it gets embarrassing… in a clear case of pride over logic, I immediately followed this up by challenging ‘gentle’ James to an arm wrestle. No prizes for guessing the way that one went (hint: it resulted in me then being tempted to go in search of 14 year old girls to challenge…).
Following the protracted expulsion from the Terraces (1am closing… if only), and an even more protracted walk to a closed club, we ended up in a bar called the Sidewinder. All very good, except for the presence of aging, denim clad northern skinhead called Dan. Now, I had presumed Dan was a friend of James; but it seems he was equally surprised by him. Dan was extremely, flamboyantly even, homophobic - a fact discreetly made obvious by repeated chants of “Tom you big gay, you bummer, you c..t” (while he was talking to a lady, no less). And yet… and yet, it still came across as a very thinly disguised mating ritual. Not that I was going to point this out to him (cf. ‘northern skinhead’).
This leads to one of the things I love about Brighton - it’s so unthreatening. In the chippie a bit later, two heavy set skinheads (the Mitchell Brothers) walked in; and the atmosphere noticeably cooled - years of living in Yorkshire meant I at least recognise chippies & Mitchell brothers to be a bad combination. But this was Brighton, and these guys were about as likely to kick off as they were to take a girl home. This kind of atmosphere is a revelation!
After a failed attempt to get into the Candy Club lesbian bar (where unlike the chippie, the clientele looked like they could actually break us in half), we found ourselves on the sea front, at 4am, being dreamily dazzled by the moonlight reflecting off the water (if this is starting to sound a bit Mills & Boon, I would like to stress it was not just 3 guys sharing a romantic interlude, we had been joined by James’ delightful wife by this point!).
Then something got started that Brighton, in all its liberal glory, was not ready for… the whitest of white skin of a tech conference delegate. It was full on exposed to the ‘gift’ of James & Chris in little more than their skimpy boxer shorts (it was a good job David Attenborough did not get wind of this bizarre new wildlife…).
David Walliams he was not, but absolute kudos to James for being brave/drunk/insane enough to actually battle rip currents & hypothermia - and no doubt thrill his lovely wife - by going deep into ’someone-call-david-hasslehoff’ danger territory. And kudos to Brighton for not batting an eyelid when a crotch-soaked nice young gent marched back into the town centre…
In summary, I simply loved Brighton - but how anyone who freelances actually manages to do any work I have no idea. Power to you!
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