RELOCATION, RELOCATION, RELOCATION...

That Wednesday May morning, from a St James’s Street newsagents, we picked up the Argus and on a bench in the sunny Steine scoured the ‘property to let’ pages – and more: the previous evening in the St James pub we’d decided to seek a temporary alternative to hotel life.

In Ha Ha at mid-day we were taking turns to make calls. ‘Yes’, I was told, ‘A self-catering apartment is available from tomorrow, but for a week only.’ Thumbing through my A-Z to find out exactly where Cavendish Place was, and after receiving the nod from Suzi, I said, ‘We’ll take it’.

With that done, we resumed flat-hunting. ‘It has to be furnished’, Suzi was saying. ‘And the rent is?’ (We weren’t in Brighton on a shoestring, but were on a budget.) Twenty-four hours later and a tad exhausted we’d viewed properties in Upper Bedford Street, Farm Road, Madeira Place and a fourth well above sea-level, somewhere off the Lewes Road. From chintszy to spartan, none came remotely close to what we’d seen on our first evening. Now a nagging doubt was forming: had we found the best one-bedroom flat in Brighton and by delaying, lost it? High on anxiety we rang the Estate Agent. Miraculously it remained on the market. By one o’clock, after raiding a hole-in-the-wall in Duke Street, our deposit was on the table. It would be another eleven days before we could move in, but we’d found our Brighton home!

There were of course hoops to jump through – initiating credit checks, contacting our Scottish guarantor, arranging insurance, finalising the details of our six-month contract - and finding time on the same day to up-sticks and head for Cavendish Place.

The abiding memory of our time in that tranquil corner was…well, have you ever been to a city and formed a strange and warm attachment not to the glamorous, but to the non-descript? That’s our experience. So it is that long after having been there, we still talk of Rue Cujas in Paris, Huttenstrasse in Berlin, and …Little Preston Street in Brighton. Many of you will pass it everyday, never giving it a second look. But it’s special to us, though we can’t put our finger on why. The best we can come up with is that it was our daily route to and from the Waitrose supermarket on Western Road, where during the ordinariness of shopping our smiles said: we’ve done it!

When it was eventually time to vacate Cavendish Place, a week-end separated us from acquiring the ‘keys to the door.’ We’d anticipated a brief, enforced return to hotel life, but lady luck came our way. A generous Brightonian offered us a mansion flat overlooking the Lawns at Hove.

Serial relocating was fun!

(If you’ve enjoyed this, read about our first evening in Brighton in ‘Arrival’ and ‘And We’re Off’).

Readers who submit articles must agree to our terms of use. The content is the sole responsibility of the contributor and is unmoderated. But we will react if anything that breaks the rules comes to our attention. If you wish to complain about this article, contact us here