From Heidi’s place in West London, I visited the Channel 5 tv studios to be a guest on their Breakfast Show, hitchhiked down south to Brighton, stayed at a student house and discovered the nightlife.
This morning Heidi woke me up a quarter to five in the morning, because at 5.15am a car would wait at the door to take both of us to the Channel 5 television studios.
Around this time we had plenty of space on the M25 motorway. This is only a two-lane road, constructed in the early 60’s and they had never expected so many people driving a car later. So at around 8 o’clock it’s standard: traffic jams! It will take you 1 hour to get where you want to go, while with less traffic you’d be there in 15 minutes. But fortunately we were lucky at this early hour.
We were received at the entrance by Hannah, one of the members of the Breakfast Show production team, and she put us in a little room to wait to get on the show – which started at 6 o’clock.
I was planned in to be a guest on the show at 6.20am so we had some time to drink some coffee and see other guests arrive.
When I sat down next to the two hosts of the show, I got wired with a microphone and when the commercial break was over, I was on live television and had a nice chat with them about my project.
After some 5 minutes the conversation was over and they unplugged me again. That was fun! While walking back to the entrance, Hannah asked if I already had a place to stay for tonight. I honestly told her I didn’t really have one yet, so she offered her phone number if there would be any case I won’t find a place to stay for this night. She is awesome!
When the driver brought us home again, Heidi was a little bit dissapointed of not being on tv herself – as she told all her friends she could be. But her biggest win still was: having me over for a night.
At here home, around 7am, we both got back to sleep again, because we were still pretty tired and 7 o’clock was just no time to be active yet – and Heidi had a free day after all.
It was around 11.30am when Heidi woke me up again, this time for some real breakfast and coffee and time to get everything packed. I contacted one of my submitted addresses in Brighton and was happy that he could have me come over today!
(By all the commotion of the last days’ circus with KissFM, I totally forget my schedule to contact my future host a few days in advance. Oops!)
Heidi set me of on one of the onramps onto the M25 again, in the direction Gatwick Airport and towards Brighton. In the first 5 minutes I already thought that it will be difficult to get a ride here, but pretty soon there was a car standing still along the road, blowing its horn to me.
I got the ride from a man called Alastair, who -lucky me- was heading home to Brighton himself! Alastair is into mobile and wireless e-business services at IBM and talked about that and the time he lived in the South of France where hitch-hiking is pretty normal, while the English people only remember the bad stories with it.
After dropping me off in the centre of Brighton, he later visited this website and wrote me an email to wish me luck – he uses the signature “Take care of the people and the people will take care of the business”, which sounds very inspiring to me.
In Brighton (visit ‘This is Brighton‘) I stayed in the student house called Minley, invited by Chris. After a quick tour through the house and all the rooms, we dumped ourselves in the little living area and got talking. Pretty soon all of his housemates would drop in and around 6 Chris started to cook spaghetti for all.
“At least there aren’t dirty dishes left around the house until they start to cultivate new life forms. Oh wait, yes there are,” is what Annette wrote on her part of the Minley-house website. And she is absolutely right.
Nowhere in the house you would find an unused spot, there must always be something piling up or standing there uncleaned for centuries. Just how a typical student house should be.
Man, I almost felt like home in the Netherlands…
As the Gift from the London Heidi, Chris got himself a silver Ying and Yang ring and was quit impressed with it. His present for my next host was already standing ready for me.
While the rest of the house was watching an episode of Friends on tv, I got onto the web and read over 75 emails and tried to update my site again. Not only the Channel 5 exposure from this morning gave it attention, the Austrian newspaper Der Standard also wrote about this site. Lots of emails were from Austria too!
After the dinner I continued with that – it was really necessary! – while the complete house was hooked on the television because of their most important sport: cricket, and England was playing against Pakistan.
Around 8 o’clock I changed my spaghetti-shirt for a clean one and Chris (wanted for cross-dressing, never standing still and never shutting up; wearing dark-green nailpolish) and Annette (wanted for manic driving, a killer alarm clock and conspiring to make the Minley Men fat) got to a pub called Hogshead. Here I met some other friends of them and we had chats about my travels so far, and the differences between the Netherlands and England.
They all just ended their college exams, so after their graduation they would all be ready to go to work or continue with another study. You could just see the relief on their face.
After two beers we all got close to the beach of Brighton, to get into the biggest disco of the English Southcoast: The Event II. While they were all standing in a 15 mins line, I just had to take a run to the beach and touch the water.
It was just a symbolic mark on my journey to touch the South English sea…
When we got in I was pretty amazed by the size of the nightclub. The entrance was on the first floor and the dancefloor was one floor down, but two floors high. So there was a great balcony I could walk around and look onto the dancefloor and with a lot of bars above and below to get drinks. This place was massive!
It became a pretty exciting and sweating night, even though the English discos already close at 2am. This Friday night was the night that only music was played from the 60’s ’till the early 90’s, so I remembered a lot from when I was much younger than now. Everybody was dressed up very well (all the young girls all looked like Britney Spears) and Chris was right that The Event II was quit a meat-market for all genders.
For Chris it was to prove to me ‘what a truly cheesy student night’ in Brighton would be like! And cheesy it was!
I even met some ladies who said they had seen me on the Channel 5 Breakfast Show this morning!
When the last record was playing we got out and walked halfway home until Chris decided to get us a taxi. That was much better, because Annette and I started to complain about exploding hips and painful feet or something like that.
I wasn’t quit sober, so at home everybody said goodnight and I got to sleep in Chris’ messy (but clean!) room, while Chris slept in another empty room.
This was quit a day and I just hoped they could let me sleep in during the morning…
Goodnight Brighton!
