Chips on the promenade. Wander down it from this far west end. Various underwalk shop portals still closed or boarded up, more obvious now than in January of course, when MOST of it was. Funny how a blank, locked doorway or a fading wall can be so evocative of the distant past. Some promenade being revamped, some restored. Whichever word you choose, it gives loudmouth jumped-up insurance salesmen, impressed by their own tenuous grip on The Culture, something to bleat on about in queues while you're seated two feet away trying to soak up the sun and the cafe stereo, about how much nicer it is now that big money is "breathing life back into the place"...oh shutup, and piss off back to your filofax and/or those travel books written by self-important LA chefs. If this place ends up looking like a shopping mall with very long pebble garden and ocean-size water-feature on one side, with afterthought of a few cheap sandstone seats and hedges put in by Alan Titchmarsh "to break up the beige", plus bonus parking spots for the chavs' Subarus and their Tracy Pollard-clone Cud-Chewers-Anonymous girl-followers, and it all attracts, as a big block of bland ugly commercial nothingness, the people that those things inevitably do, then what will be the point of leaving London?
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