God's Waiting Room

We took a trip into Eastbourne yesterday. Now, for those of you who don't know it, Eastbourne is a busy seaside resort at the eastern end of the South Downs. It is often referred to as God's Waiting Room because of the large number of elderly people who have chosen it as their last dwelling place upon this earth. I must admit to having seen a number of folk who would make Methusaleh feel like a young whipper-snapper, and you do have to watch that you don't get run over by those little motorised trollies or injured by badly-handled zimmer frames. These things aside, Eastbourne is a fairly pleasant place; a bit like Brighton but without the vibrant gay and artistic communities. Many of its hotels have seen better days, and now have a kind of faded grandeur. One can imagine them staffed by aged waiters and chambermaids called Arthur and Tilly, who have probably been serving Brown Windsor and turning down beds since Charles Dickens came to stay.

One curious fact that came to light was that more elderly people than youngsters in Eastbourne have been served with Anti Social Behaviour Orders. It seems that they get involved in late night DIY to the annoyance of their neighbours and all manner of other cantankerous encounters. One man, a self-employed gardener, was issued with an ASBO for trying to drum up custom for his business in an aggressive manner. I wonder what was said...Come on! You know you want your roses pruned! It'd be a shame if those garden gnomes fell down the stairs, now wouldn't it?

Eastbourne is close to the dizzy heights of Beachy Head, a 535 foot chalk cliff with a lighthouse at its foot. Apparently the Head has been a popular venue for suicides since the 1600s (I wonder where they went in the 1500s...or were there other preferred methods of suicide before the 17th century?) with around twenty people a year choosing to step off the edge of the cliff and into oblivion. 'A six hundred foot drop can be deadly', says the BBC's Inside Out website in a curious case of stating the rather obvious. Some years ago a telephone box was placed close to the edge of the cliff with telephone numbers for the Samaritans plastered all over it, so one would hope this would reduce the incidence of suicides. One chap threw himself off, only to land on a ledge two hundred feet down the side of the cliff. Having been spoken to by a local policeman and clearly having got something out of his system, he then calmly lit a cigarette and waited for the helicopter to arrive!

Our trip was not troubled with anything so disturbing as a two hundred foot cliff tumble, no; it was merely to purchase some curtains and enjoy a leisurely lunch. And so, surrounded by the octogenarians of what is supposed to be the sunniest resort on the South Coast, we ate, we drank, we curtained. If, of course, you will permit me to use curtain as a verb.