Brighton
By Dave • November 6th, 2007
I’ve been to Brighton before, as a lad, with a classic car rally, with strict instructions to cover my eyes if a bikini wandered past. So going there as a proper adult was a good experience. It’s less than an hour from London, and for the first few hours we were there it was very much like Glastonbury, minus the mud. Excellent thrift stores, pot emporiums and the cafes around North Street eventually led us to the legendary Snoopers Paradise, a cornucopia of the lost and found. You’ll also find a terrifying (if you’re anything like me, anyway) number of cool people. Going to Brighton is a bit like falling into a giant Urban Outfitters ad. The beach and pier are still the main reasons to go, especially on a bright day, but before we did we visited the Museum of Penny Slot Machines. It sits a few yards from the beach, and has an impressive selection of slot machines from the thirties and forties.
You trade modern money for old coins from an impressively-coiffured man in the booth, and are invited to kill an hour or so feeding change into machines that will tell you, with varying degrees of accuracy, your strength, future (either from your palm-based or from an horrific-looking animatronic gypsy-head) or alternatively, just how repressed your ancestors were. I have no idea how much of a stir the machine below caused, but, having dropped in your 1d (cheap, I’d have thought, for such instant smut access), turn the handle and the cards flip past, giving the impression that a very tiny, naked lady is foraging around in the undergrowth. Sadly, there was no indication as to exactly where such machines could be found in their day, although I’d like think they were as much a part of the landscape as those pay-per-view telescopes you get now. Here it is in action.
We (naturally) had chips, possibly a slight mistake given our next activity involved the Super Booster on the end of the pier. You’re strapped into a cradle, pivoted 100 feet in the air and then dropped, swinging pendulum style, for about half a minute. The acceleration is immense – 0-60 miles per hour in three seconds makes any kind of voluntary movement completely impossible. I, being a brave soul, was paralysed with fear anyway. Once you’re at the far end of the swing you dangle for a split second, giving me exactly long enough to register the appalled expressions of the onlookers below, who had never seen someone so terrified shoot past at such speed. It isn’t dizzying, just fast, and once I was off and my heartrate had slowed, I rationalised that this must be what Having Fun feels like. What exactly is wrong with rollercoaster fans, anyway?
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