St Leonards to Bexhill-on-Sea

The train was packed with day-trippers. Through a gap in the seats I spied a young woman with an alarmingly contoured face; its soft planes a modernist experiment in chiaroscuro.  
She was obviously a younger friend of the woman sitting opposite with two children and, once I stopped judging her misunderstanding of how light interacts with three dimensional forms, I found her to be a warm and friendly person.  She provided a masterclass in modern idiom and kindly involved the toddlers in the conversation; teaching them to say, “Yass, Queen!” and singing snatches of pop songs to them.
She and her companion discussed her mum’s new boyfriend:
“Has he got the ’tism?”
“Probably, he’s been round Jacob enough.”
It was a fast train and my concentration on fellow passengers meant I noticed very little of the landscape outside the window – of parched fields buzzcut to the bone.
St Leonards has been gentrified by incoming Londoners. If this means there’s been an influx of creative people with taste, then that’s a good thing, but unfortunately it drives up property prices.  I would move there in a flash, if I had the means.  
The main takeaway from this day out was my conclusion that I would probably be about 100 times happier if I lived by the seaside – even looking at the sea is like a balm to the psyche.  Yesterday it was a seductive baby blue and I wanted to bury myself in the shingle on the shoreline and let it swallow me whole. Though I’m not sure the sea gods need my sacrifice to appease them – the town seems to be thriving.
The walk along the coastal path from St Leonards to Bexhill-on-Sea is apparently about four miles.  It takes the traveller past many warnings of danger: deep voids, caterpillars of the brown-tailed moth and of falling from cliffs onto the beach below.  However, there’s no need to be afraid if you’re a sensible person; it is simply a straight walk – along a railway line for some of the way – and with a constant view of the sparkling sea.  Cyclists are the only menace and I witnessed a fellow pedestrian receive the pass-agg shout of “dingle-lingle-ling” from a lycra-clad stockbroker, or whatever it is the affluent incomers do.  
I made it safely to the De La Warr Pavilion, which rests sedately on the seafront, like a retired cruise liner. I’ve reached the age where I’m very motivated by the quest for cups of tea, but first I had a look at the temporary exhibition – which was guarded by a baby owl.  She was a frail fledging of woman, with round glasses and soft drapery wings and she kept such a beady eye on me, that I thought perhaps she was besotted. (St Leonards has a very lesbian vibe).  I was wrong – she was just incredibly vigilant and thought I was likely to damage the paintings.  I took a biro out of my bag to make a note of one of the artists and she swooped on me:
“Excuse me, but do you perhaps have a pencil?” I explained my interest in the artist’s use of a restricted palette.  This did the trick and she then recommended a film in the cinema upstairs – with the proviso that is contained “racialist language”.
As I walked away from the building, an outraged middle-aged couple were discussing a review of East Sussex towns, which had the cheek to place Bexhill-on-Sea in fourth position, due to it’s lack of shops.  I’m afraid there is a paucity of sophisticated retail opportunities, but it has an amusingly Chinglish-named charity shop called “Warming up the Homeless” to make up for this.
The rest of my day was the same, but in reverse, and I rewarded myself with a fish bap from Goat Ledge on the St Leonards seafront AND a vanilla ice cream in a waffle cone.  I had walked over 20,000 steps by this point and well deserved it.