Hovercrafts Rule OK

On Saturday, in a bid to get away from the fuzz of London for the weekend, we headed to the south coast in the car. First stop - Devil's Dyke, which hangs above Brighton, you can see the sea as you travel downwards and it gives great views over Sussex. Far below a cricket match is taking place. You can see the cricketers' whites from way up here. But where are the hand gliders? This area used to be full of hand gliders back in the eighties. The National Trust, who make you pay to park here now (thanks for that contribution) have a picture of the scene below featuring the hand gliders, but they are nowhere to be seen.

At West Wittering, we walk the sand dunes in anoraks, while below families are sunbathing and swimming. The beach is sandy, the sea blue and full of yachts, but it doesn't feel that warm. We head to Chichester to find a guesthouse, but see a sign for Portsmouth and change our minds.

Portsmouth is run down and not that inviting when you drive in, a place caught somewhere in the early eighties, like so many other seaside resorts, which is how I like it, because the early eighties was the last time I was here. We came here for a school trip and went to the fair and the beach. I remember I was 12 and wearing my first ever fashionable pair of jeans. It was when drainpipe jeans were in fashion and they were really tight at the bottom and it took ages to get your foot through the holes. Any slight gap and you were a gaylord for wearing flares. I remember there was no-one taking the money at the Maze of Mirrors and a few of us ran in. Then the guy came back and was really irate. We ran out, but one guy, Lee Dumbrell couldn't find his way out. The guy was shouting at him and he was trying to get out but he kept walking into the glass. They cancelled the school trip the following year, because apparently our visit to the fair wasn't considered educational enough.

I used to come here with my family a lot as well. We used to walk along the promenade and watch the laughing policeman. You put ten pence in the machine and the laughing policeman was behind glass and he used to laugh and we did too. He's not there anymore. The thing that really excited us though was the hovercraft. We always wanted to get a hovercraft to the Isle of Wight but it was too expensive.

I wanted to re-live that excitement, but felt that at 39 the hovercraft would no longer do it for me. We headed to the promenade anyway and watched it come in, and it's still great. It approaches the Promenade really fast. When it leaves is the best, because it inflates and the Hovercraft stands tall, and then it spins around really smoothly and shoots off into the sea. This time round though we boarded it and headed off to the Isle of Wight, on Sunday for breakfast. It was good being on it, but it still doesn't beat watching it leave.