Did you know the Battle of Hastings never took place in Hastings? I certainly didn't until I came to live here.

The battle took place in Battle, about four or five miles distant. When King Harold made his last stand, it was on a grassy knoll in the middle of rolling farmland, not on the hills overlooking the town.

And when invading hordes embarked to do battle with Harold, it is fair to assume they didn't stop to think where the skirmish was going to take place, though they might be a bit peeved to learn they apparently fought it in the wrong place.

All this is a roundabout way of saying I live in Hastings, not Battle.

Most people trade up. We traded down, from London - Harlesden, Walthamstow, Plumstead, Hastings - progressively until the millstones of mortgages and high interest rates were released from our sagging shoulders.

What is wrong with Hastings you might ask? Absolutely nothing. It has low property prices and honest-to-goodness, clean, invigorating fresh air.

I realise now that living in London should have carried a health warning. Beware: Ten million people live in and around these few square hectares of rat-infested, mostly-reclaimed marshland. There's bubonic plague and black death beneath your feet and the blue skies are mostly a sickly shade of pale. If you must breathe, please make sure it's not deeply.

Then there's the traffic. Looked at from afar, London seems like one vast lunatic asylum, the lunatics being all the motorists trying to get out. Or is it get in?

Traffic moves at a slower rate than it did in the era of the horse-drawn carriage 100 years ago. Did the Wragg stagecoaches travel in convoys like modern buses? Were there five-mile tailbacks at the Lea Bridge turnpike? The bad news is it can only get worse.

What are the solutions? Build even more roads? Where and how? Tax cars off the roads? Pass Tony Blair the Stanley knife - he might as well cut his throat now.

Of course, there is always public transport but many motorists are snobs when it comes to this. "Happiness is a warm car" was an article in a London paper.

It found many people drove because they found it preferable to sharing a carriage or seat on public transport with people who had a different outlook on life.

The good news is you can do as I did - get out. Come to sunny Hastings. Breathe some good air and feel ten years younger.

On second thoughts, don't. You'll all be here instead of there. Smog, fumes, traffic-james, noise... aaaagh!

-T O'Brien, Plynlimmon Road, Hastings