The break dancers are jamming to live music near the Pavilion gardens.  I feel pain.  It gnaws away at me as the sheets of rain fall over New Road.  I’m stood here just before the fringe has begun.

 

Some show teams are wearing phenomenal costumes behind me including some blokes in pink net skirts ready to cheerlead in long blonde wigs.  They are just the nicest men I could have met who want to take me out drinking but if I stay with them then this may all end differently.  

 

Alternative fortification calls as the cast from an Oscar Wilde epic approach.  We go on a Bunburyist wander for strong tea but get stopped half way and made to laugh out loud by a man promoting a comedy show performed by aliens.  He is obviously having the best luck at giving out flyers so I scout around for tips.

 

I realise the robotic movements of a computer wearing show team with a head in a cardboard box is paying dividends in giving out flyers.  I try to be a bit more thrusting in my body posture.  I don’t want it to be said that I didn’t at least try.  Thankfully Carluccio’s is behind me and Boho Gelato is on my way home so there are incentives all the way. Thanks to the kind punters who marched along New Road and sometimes even apologised because they did not want a flyer, all my flashbacks are happy ones.  

 

Brighton shows real class and intelligence as I engage in some phenomenally inspiring conversations with senior residents who lived here during the very same Nazi air attack my play dramatises.  I come out in goose bumps when I hear the emotions the threat of invasion brings out in those who live through it.

 

There is live music all the way as I meet the very best of people out on New Road, some I am now in cyber contact with, all fighting for the same punters to fill our studio spaces.  The diversity of shows on offer is staggering.  During one down pour I huddle under a shop canopy with a gent peddling leaflets for flotation classes to classical music.  Even the show description is pure relaxation.  The feeling comes back in my fingertips, even though I have been clutching the same leaflet tightly for ten minutes.  The rain stops and a heat wave commences, and so we do battle with our flyers once again and all for the very best of reasons.  The real winner on New Road during May is entertainment!