OK, a short break at the seaside, we decided.

Jenny and I got the 493 down to the car hire company. An uncouth woman got on the bus near Colliers Wood. “Do you go South Wimbledon?” she said to the bus driver, mimicking the voice patterns of her 2 year old child, i.e. “Need to go toilet.” She pushed a buggy containing the aforementioned child, who, in Jenny's words was “laden down with so much of the family jewellery she looks like she's being transported to her Brahmin caste wedding, or something.”

We were supplied with an automatic Nissan Micra which, joy of joys, had a slot loading CD player, so it was back to the flat to pick up Chicago, Hall & Oates, Supertramp and Steely Dan, and then off again down the A24 towards Croydon listening to “Babylon Sisters” and pretending that we were motoring down the freeway to Big Sur, wherever the hell that might be. We were unfamiliar with the locking system of the Nissan Micra and particularly the intricacies of the anti-hijack mode, so the back passenger doors were left unlocked throughout the journey, leaving us highly vulnerable to hijack. As we pulled up at traffic lights in the sleepy Sussex village of Heathfield our eyes darted nervously to the left and right while clutching our belongings, terrified that an elderly woman armed with a crochet hook might jump in and order us to transport her to a tea dance.

We motored gently through Battle (apparently battles are so called because one took place here) and down into Hastings. The first thing we saw was a body being carried out of a building by two queasy looking police officers. Down through Bohemia (distinctly unbohemian and very unremeniscent of the northern Czech Republic) and into the Old Town, where we had booked into a b&b called, unbelievably, Lavender And Lace. I could tell immediately that it wasn't mock Tudor by the way I smacked my head on two beams on the way up to our small room. The floor had a disorientatingly adverse camber, contained a porcelain figurine and was dominated by a 4 poster bed that creaked alarmingly and is thus one of the most effective contraceptives yet invented.

After a nasty altercation with a parking ticket machine and a heated phone call to Hastings council regarding a STUPID parking ticket machine, we started walking. The seafront almost had an air of decaying grandeur, had there had ever been any grandeur there to begin with. The pier was particularly grim, deserted except for a few bored employees in the amusement arcade, for whom the counting of stacks of 10p pieces provided limited amusement. We peered into lots of shops that had either shut down for winter or perhaps shut down for ever, and a sign proclaiming that the Pub On The Pier was open, when it was in fact closed.

We met up with Ronan – drummer of Spearmint – who lives down here, and we walked back through the old town and its implausable collection of shops, including one dedicated solely to the vending of Russian dolls to a public in desperate need to put wooden objects inside slightly larger wooden objects. We went back to his house in Blacklands, a wonderful place with umpteen bedrooms, several dozen toilets and a fluffy cat called Thomson, and after two bottles of wine had been crashed through we called a cab to take Jenny and I back into Hastings for something to eat. Our run of bad luck with taxis continued; it didn't arrive for 90 minutes, by which time all the restaurants were shutting. Jenny pleaded with an Italian pizza chef to make us some kind of crusty dough based snack with cheese and tomato topping, and after tears appeared in the corners of her eyes he relented. Relief. Then back to Lavender and Lace, where Jenny launched into a tirade concerning the Lux shower gel that lurked in the bathroom containing “oriental oils and palm milk”. “Oriental oils? What the f*ck are oriental oils?”

Today: to Brighton, and the opening of a swanky new hotel, which we have been invited to, but not been invited to stay at. So, more thrilling tales of adventures from bed and breakfast land this time tomorrow.