Worthing

Worthing is on the south coast, a few miles from Brighton. Oscar Wilde wrote The Importance of Being Earnest there, and although nothing has sparkled quite so much since, it's a pretty little town, scuffed and shabby in places, spiffed and polished up in others, with a long stretch of rocky beach, tearooms, arcades, and flocks of gulls floating on the thermals overhead.

The motorway out of London looks like any other highway until you're well out of the city. Then it winds through the Sussex downs, past flocks of sheep and occasional horses cropping the endless green, old stone churches frowning down from hilltops, and a large pub called, quite implausibly, The Joyful Whippet. (I don't think I've ever seen a whippet that even approached cheerful, never mind joyful.)