FESTIVAL CHOICE:
I slightly object to the Charleston Festival on the grounds that it's impossible to get to using public transport, but if you CAN get there, check out Margaret Atwood reading from her new novel Oryx and Crake @ 7.30pm.

I had a cappuccino and two lemon and poppyseed muffins for breakfast this morning, made from scratch in my own home (not actually by me, but still...) It goes to show that you do NOT need Starbucks to have a good time.

A few too many muffins is perhaps what has led me to Alive, a health and fitness centre tucked away on Castle Street off Western Road. Now, it is very much the policy of LoveBrighton not to frequent gyms, but Alive do offer a good range of dance classes, martial arts etc, in a relatively non-scary environment (the studio IS lined with mirrors, but we'll let that pass). In fact, three or four new gyms have sprung up in town recently, a sure sign of an over-affluent society I'd say. What's wrong with swimming in the sea for exercise? Oh yeah...

FESTIVAL CHOICE:
This is chosen almost at random (not for nothing did we go to Luke Rhinehart), but it does look interesting - Into The Crucible - an alchemy of dance and music @ St Bartholemews Church, Ann Street. 7.30pm. 'Spiraldance, overtone singing, live music from Mongolia to Mozart combine to tell the story of a magician and a mute...'

Yesterday LoveBrighton attended the Mackerel Fayre on the seafront, a throwback to the days when Brighton still had an industry that didn't involve computers or wearing Carhaart. The centrepiece of the morning was the Blessing Of The Nets ceremony, where the vicar of Brighton traditionally says prayers for the fishermen and their catch for the coming year. It was terribly poignant to be part of such a jolly event - Salvation Army band, people collecting for Lifeboats and all - when the fishing community is in the doldrums. We even sang For Those In Peril On The Sea...

I don't really like fish, which makes it difficult for me to support local fishmongers directly, but YOU CAN make a difference by doing this, and similarly by going to the fantastic monthly farmer's market in Bartholemew Square.

Luke Rhinehart, Friday 16 May

George Cockcroft, aka Luke Rhinehart, aka several other Luke Rhineharts, was always going to be one of the more interesting propositions of this year’s Brighton Festival. The jacket of his 1971 novel The Dice Man confidently proclaimed that it would ‘change your life’, and indeed many readers have since sought to follow the Luke Rhinehart of the novel in breaking through convention and inhibition, making life decisions on the roll of a die. Whether The Dice Man was intended as a satire on far-fetched experiments in psychoanalysis or as a genuine manifesto for a liberated individual no longer matters. Few novels have had their premise taken so literally, and George/Luke still corresponds with hundreds of ‘Dice Livers‘. Come to see a cult author who has rarely appeared in public, the audience that filled the Corn Exchange would no doubt have been happy to listen raptly to the man for ninety minutes. But this event was hosted/engineered by Gavin Robertson, an actor, writer and director who has recently revived his 1986 play based on the Dice Man, The Six Sided Man. Robertson was at pains to point out that, in keeping with the crazy world of dicing, this would not be a ‘traditional literary event’. But anyone who has seen much genuinely experimental performance would not have found anything startling in Friday’s format. There was an introduction by the festival literature programmer, Robertson put questions to Rhinehart, which were answered, extracts from the books were read out, and there were questions from the floor. Nothing radical or randomised here. The clumsy attempts at audience participation (I hate it, but that‘s being inhibited and British for you), the comedy strait jacket, and the supposedly rebellious selection of alcoholic beverages on stage did not stop this event being eminently traditional. Perhaps this was in keeping with the ageing, mellowing Rhinehart, who admitted that he has become more or less the kind of ‘patterned’ entity his books tried to deconstruct, and that in practice, a balance between order and chaos is necessary for a functioning society. Something which is already obvious to critical readers of The Dice Man. Like all the best novels of ideas, it raises niggling questions about everything you took for granted, but also keeps you awake at night constructing arguments against it. Most of us are attracted by the idea of putting our decisions into the hands of chance and so perhaps liberating other sides of our personality, but also repelled by the implications for social interaction of becoming an entirely inconsistent, overtly multiple entity. Rhinehart was illuminating on the origins of the book, as well as its problems, and his own early experiments with dicing, but - I can’t help but moan about this - he would have been able to be so at much greater length had there not been extensive interruptions from Gavin Robertson with his own interpretations, questions and stories about his play. Not to mention the appearance of writer Ben Marshall, who wrote about his own dice living for Loaded magazine. All interesting, but superfluous padding when an author has as much to say for himself, and as much to explain, as Luke Rhinehart.