A Love Letter to Lewes, from a bibliophile.

I can see why it's pronounced ‘Lewis’ and not ‘Lose’, like it looks phonetically. ‘A love letter to Lose’ has a completely different ring to it, has a completely different meaning. There's nothing about your character I want you to lose. Darling, don’t change.

Stay the same. Long may you continue to proclaim you’re the home of ‘The Fifteenth Century Bookshop’, even though it didn’t become a bookshop until 1935. Because you're not a relic, you're not living in the past, you're not an echo of a different time.

You're no amateur production, or even a very good reproduction, you’re no knock-off, no second; you just are.

You have 6 bonfire societies! No other village, or town, or city loves fire quite like you. Three and a half thousand people all planning how best to raise the flames. I know where to go when I want to learn the intricacies of arsonry.

I’m going to join the throng of 60,000 people that come to see you burn; Join the endless choruses of “there’s only 17,000 residents, how can all these people fit into the streets?”.  Join the bridge of exclamations and nods that punctuate the glee with titters of, “you have to book two years in advance these days!”

I’ll get wonderstruck with you, hushed and awed and private in Bow Windows Bookshop with you. I’ll know not to mention that the shop doesn’t actually have bow windows; I’ll never pick a fight with the owner Ric about it; I’d never try to belittle you my beloved. Ric can sense my sincerity, he wouldn’t have shown me the hand-painted fairies otherwise.

I won’t be patronising about your friends or make derogatory comments about how neither Fisher Street Frames nor Morris Road Garage, can actually be found on those roads.

We can umm and ahh about which Anna de Geus painting is most ‘us’. Try to spot her in the garden or unloading a canvas that’s bigger than her. I solemnly swear to always marvel at her tenacity, “in her 90s and still challenging herself to go one bigger”. We can keep her as our role model as life tries to go sprinting by us.

I’ll never refuse to go into the Flea market; even though I absolutely know we won’t just “be a minute”. The managers will still call us ‘young’, long after we are not, because of that incident the first time we went in. When we couldn’t open that suitcase we wanted, assumed the key was lost, the item thus defunct, but really, we had just never seen a case where you pressed the lock down to magically release it.

I can get used to your favourite picnic spot being ‘the mound’ and forget about the mouldering skulls below the ground; because being at one with you is easy. You’re so unassuming, so breezy. Let’s paint a date above our door and live-on here forevermore.

Yours in earnest,

A bibliophile.

Lewes, located in Sussex, the south of England, was as dreamy as it sounds in my exultant love letter. Considering I'm Welsh, and was brought up in South Wales, I have very limited knowledge of the South of England. Preferring to spend time in the North West, happily swathed in that chittering embrace of nasal annunciations and a soundtrack to live by bursting forth from independent record shops, bars and cars.

The industrial North has long been popular with the working class, starving artists and socialists; undoubtedly I was destined to find my brethren there. Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester all voted Remain in the Brexit referendum, while the south East, notably Sussex and Kent, with the exception of Brighton, voted to Leave.

Why would sleepy little England appeal to me, a former student of Culture, and current student of Travel Writing? Surely, the homogeneity would intimidate? Obviously, people were going to titter about Georgia and I holding hands. Inevitably, quaint tea-rooms and expensive gift-shops would be twee and paisley visions of a class and culture I would only feel ill at ease with.

As I planned my jaunt across the river, I tried to foresee how best to respond if I saw Morris dancers with blackened faces or Golliwogs grinning innocuously from shop windows. (Yes, I have seen both aberrations and been ill-prepared).

I was abashed to find that I received the kind of hospitality I only associate with provincial Spain or Italy, or, maybe more truthfully, the past. There was an openness and civility that didn't feel edged with anything or a product of anything. As I recorded the recommendations of a pizza maker, he flapped a bus driver over to add his tuppence worth and a homeless lady, missing her front teeth, chipped in her views from a table too. (A table that would undoubtedly be reserved for patrons, but she seemed to be quite welcome at.)

Sometimes the thing that most endures about a place, once you have left it, is how far from your expectations it was. Lewes had a swagger like a Jagger, albeit in a more demure, sustained-by-tea, manner.