Today was a chilly, wet, blustery, just-what-you-would-expect-from-the-English-coast-in-the-middle-of-October sort of day. Jeremy and I walked along the beach with the wind whipping across the water and the sea crashing and churning against the stones. The miserable weather seemed to fit somehow, and it was wonderful.

I absolutely love the smell of salty water and the sound of waves, and I have ever since I was a kid. When I was younger, my family used to go visit my grandparents in Florida during the summer. We would very often take a flight into Jacksonville and then drive the hour and a half or so down to St. Augustine, where my grandparents lived.

I was always so excited when we got into the car and started heading down the coast. I distinctly remember landing in Jacksonville one evening and driving through the night to St. Augustine, the car jolting rhythmically over the bumps and cracks in the pot-holed highway, the windows down a bit to let in the tangibly humid, salt-heavy air. I sat in the backseat of that darkened car, dozing off gently with the ocean smell filling my nostrils, and I was content and thrilled and filled with the anticipation of a holiday at the beach - an anticipation that was rivaled only by the anticipation I felt for Christmas as a child. It’s a happy, comforting memory, and every time I smell the ocean - like today - that Florida memory comes back to me.

But back to Brighton… The sea doesn’t really smell so “oceanic" most of the time here. It seems that the salt smell is the strongest when the weather is the worst - and the weather has been predictably bad lately. And it seems that, when the weather isn’t absolutely horrible here, it’s absolutely gorgeous. When the sky is blue in Brighton, it’s really blue. Maybe it’s got something to do with being on the water, or maybe it’s just the contrast with all the sparkling white and cream and yellow buildings that line the seafront which makes the sky such a brilliant, intense blue here - “Brighton blue”, as I’ve taken to calling it. When the weather is good here, everything is much fresher and brighter. The buildings gleam and the sunlight is blinding. The town looks completely different: spiffy, elegant, clean.

But I actually quite like it when the weather is bad. Before I moved here, I kept saying that I thought miserable weather on the seaside must be different - more bearable - than miserable weather “inland." I’m happy to discover that this is really true. Brighton can look fairly grim on a grey day, but on such days the buildings also seem to take on a gloomy sort of decadence that I find rather appealing. And if nothing else, when it’s windy and rainy outside, the streets are a tiny bit less crowded, the beach is completely empty, and the cafes are even more cozy and inviting than usual.

Maybe after weeks and months of hurricane-like winds and torrential rains, I’ll take back what I’ve said about the appeal of the seaside and the town in the bad weather, but for now everything just seems atmospheric, and everything is an adventure, and all in all, I’m enjoying myself immensely.