At Marrocco’s on the front at Hove there is a queue of ice-cream malcontents, of whom we are five: my friend the photographer Polly Borland and I, together with three of our children. A bank of sea mist that’s been hovering offshore all afternoon is beginning to dip and sway in towards us; ahead of it comes a premonition of immemorial dankness, a Dickensian pong. I shouldn’t be surprised if, when it lifted, a prison hulk were revealed, its rotting spars piercing the shoreline of Worthing.   More...