The Great British Bank Holiday

My observation that this damp island has just endured a solid month of almost parodically awful weather will surprise few readers. Those of us born and bred here now have another soggy, pewter-tinged memory to file away under 'Crap Bank Holiday Weekends' with all the others we've endured since childhood. There's something stoical and almost perverse about the British at play on such weekends; on a spin along the country roads you will pass clutches of shivering, kagoul-toting 'Action Families', usually led by a Dad whose secret yearnings to lead a troupe to the North Pole were only thwarted by his wife's greater determination to tame his Scottian spirit, but now they've got kids of their own he's damn well having his moment and forcing them up the muddiest most exposed slope of Mount Caburn in a Force 9 gale. And all over the country communities spend months almost wilfully blind to the oft-repeated climactic lessons, and plan parades and charades and more parades involving the construction of ten-foot paper dragons which melt on contact with the relentless rain, or face paint which the next downpour will coax disturbingly down many a stubbly chin.

So it was in Hastings over the weekend; the annual Jack in the Green jamboree was certainly not going to be halted by a little rain (or even emasculated away into an indoor version.). Despite the glowering rolling clouds heaving their way across the English Channel towards the town. The people of Hastings are made of stern stuff, whatever the Normans would have you believe, and as the visitors (like us) ran back to our cars to grab another layer or pair of socks, the black-faced troupes (nothing to do with minstrels; do NOT ask these folk to sing 'Way Down Upon the Swanee River'; they're smugglers and wreckers (for the day) and general purpose wrong 'uns.) made their increasingly excitable and inebriated way around the steep winding twittens of the (very) Old Town, carousing as though the weather was nothing more than another challenge. You can see a picture of one of them above, on the way to find his troupe. When they all get moving, it's an impressive and highly weird sight.

 I love going to Hastings as it's so determined not to be Brighton; despite its community of artists and its clutch of knowingly-appointed 'vintage' shops (I got a great Fifties blouse)it's not hip or cool or falling over itself to impress you. It's a little isolated, at the end of a long, lonely train line and a grim road across the protected marshlands, and its inaccessibility keeps it trapped within itself, to the evident satisfaction of some but to the economic disadvantage of many more, as its social problems and unemployment continue to demonstrate. We stopped at the new controversial Jerwood Gallery - recently opened to highly vocal opposition from the fishermen whose fleet is moored on the shingle just outside the new, tastefully tiled and sympathetically designed cultural interloper. It's a perfect symbol of the opposing forces tussling over the future of this historical, troubled little town; those who see its survival as dependent on receiving a good shot of the 'St Ives Effect', and those who resent or are suspicious of the enforced gentrification and further social division that may result. Or those who just hate the sort of Shoreditch Ponces that tend to go to galleries. Either way, the Jerwood is really quite a subtle, gentle structure that doesn't seem to trumpet its bourgeois presence and for my money looks a damn sight better than the coach park it replaced. Go along and see for yourself, if you're on the South Coast, and then stuff your face with the best fish and chips from any of the traditional family restaurants across the road. And buy a pint of brown shrimps from the fishmongers - they'll have been caught the same morning. Just watch out for the troupes of shouting blackfaced revellers in the pubs - those lads are tough.

 If time and rain allow, you could also do worse than head from the town centre about a mile West along the coast, to Bulverhythe where if you're very VERY lucky, you can get a look at the wreck of The Amsterdam, which sank into the mud in 1749 while packed with bullion and plague-raddled sailors and has been there ever since. When tides are very low, the poor old ship pokes through like a pleading skeleton, and the form of the vessel is eerily visible until the tide rolls in and claims it once again. It's an amazing, haunting sight and best of all, hardly anyone knows it's there. Bear in mind also, as you squelch across the flat sucking ground on your way out to the dead ship, that the strange rotted-looking substance you keep coming across that looks like masses and masses of soaked and buried wood, is in fact just that. You're standing on a 4,000 year old forest that the sea took back long before there were Normans or Germans or anything else threatening the South Coast, and huge decomposing trunks and logs are trapped down there along with the Amsterdam and its doomed sailors (who apparently met their end at the hands of the ancestors of the face-painted Hastings revellers, always on the lookout for a wreck full of silver and viewing the crew in the same way as the Nostromo gang were classified in 'Alien'.).

On reflection, it really was a rather fine Bank Holiday Weekend.