What happened to dirty weekends in Brighton?

Just found an article on the Guardian website about the tradition of dirty weekends in Brighton. And what do you know? Apparently battered cod is a known aphrodisiac as I said in my last post. So it was the fish, not me, after all. Bugger.

Read the full article (extract below) - it's quite a good take on the British view of romance. I've just seen another one in today's print version of the Guardian, an American's view of the British aversion to dating: "By dating I don't mean occasionally bumping into each other and snogging each other until you finally decide you're going out" - yep, that sounds like the British way of doing things to me! Get pissed, get off, get it on. If I can find a link to an online version I'll post it.

What happened to dirty weekends in Brighton?: "There's something uniquely English about the concept of the dirty weekend. The French and Italians don't even have a word for it, but then they've never felt the need to decamp to the seaside for a bit of extracurricular. My American friends quite sweetly think it is something to do with sports. I wonder whether the Empire wasn't sustained through the British ability to impose mannered order on the fearsome unknown - as with India, so with Brighton, which we had to invent because we're terrified of sex.

In his book Breakfast in Brighton, Nigel Richardson posits our very own Sodom-on-Sea as 'the antithesis of England', but Brighton couldn't exist anywhere else. In its heyday, Brighton may have been the genius loci of sexual, sartorial and culinary excess, but there remains something peculiarly British about its ritualisation of the forbidden. A whiff of sea air and battered cod and we are free to cast off our inhibitions along with our raincoats and frolic on the shores of delight, or so the theory goes."