SEAGULLS SQUITTER OVER-head. Cracks in the pavement trip your feet. Potholes tear at your tyres. The precipitate topography of Hastings wears down ill-advised retirees, who stagger between slope and strand. Rubbish overflows from bulging bins. On the beach the stones stick in my dogs’ paws.
Along the esplanade civic vulgarianism has vandalised such fragments of faded elegance as Hitler spared. But there are compensations: the gaunt, ruined outline of the clifftop castle, the rickety charm of
