I’m an eight quid at the local barber kinda guy. You sit down and flick through GQ for a few minutes, take the first chair that comes up and make a few half-arsed suggestions about what you would like and emerge fifteen minutes later, inevitably, with a short back and sides. Needless to say I was apprehensive about going to what I believe they call a ‘salon’. But what fun! I see the attraction now.

Shine’s Brighton ‘salon’ in Gloucester Road is lovely: homely, roomy and, well, shiny and stylish. Most surprising were the comfy chairs and big kitchen table with piles of mags and women having a cuppa as bits of foil did whatever mysterious work bits of foil do to hair. It was just like they were just at home. How relaxing.

Charles, an Isle of Wight native, was my stylist and spent (get this) fully five minutes talking about what I’d like doing. He seemed even more excited about the whole thing than me. Once we’d decided, Miriam the polymath receptionist turned masseuse gave me a superb and very relaxing head and shoulder massage before I had my hair washed and shampooed. And then to the chair, a fairtrade coffee and the main event.

Who knew that a haircut could be a pleasant experience? I had a very enjoyable conversation with charming Charles and he never once mentioned holidays or football as he deftly clipped and trimmed my barnet. And what was particularly nice was the privacy. It’s once thing having an indulgent time but quite another to do it with people peering in through the window as if you’re a goldfish. Shine’s Salon is set back from the pavement, so I relaxed knowing noone was peering in and extracting the michael.

From a business perspective, Shine is cocking a snoop at the recession. Established in 2007 by Jonathan Harries, it was an independent enterprise formed to take his two decades experience as a hairdresser in a new direction. In particular, he wanted to reflect his environmental concerns and also provide a stylish and comfortable salon experience. And it must be going well: this year the salon moved to premises and expanded the services it provides. The bigger salon means that Shine now offer spa treatments too.

And best of all, my newly coiffed hair passed the test. Normally, an eight quid cut goes unnoticed. But my gleaming new shiny Shine do prompted a girl down the boozer that I’ve fancied for ages to comment that it looked “really nice”. That makes it officially the best raffle prize and the best hair cut I’ve ever had. Next time, I’ll just have to pay.

The idea sprang from the Brighton Future of News group. Spearheaded by the pioneering Online Editor of the Brighton Argus Jo Wadsworth, with Sarah Marshall and Steve Bustin, the map is a collaborative experiment to share the political conversations candidates have with voters in the relative privacy of the doorstep and away from the prying eyes of the media.

It’s a good idea and I wouldn’t be surprised if the aim was to expose possible discrepancies between what candidates say publicly and ‘privately’: that’s a good thing. We’re not yet 24 hours into the experiment and what do we see?

When the map was first published the Greens had a tiny handful of flags (3?) and a party apparatchik has spent some time in the past day adding those little green flags. Tory candidate Charlotte Vere told me on Twitter that her ‘flag count’ grew because she was “just including the points from my own map.” Labour candidate Nancy Platts has only used Twitter to add her red flags.

Can the best efforts of a local newspaper experimenting with social media, keen to report one of the most fascinating electoral races in the country, usefully shape a tight run race? I do hope so. If 2010 is the first ‘social media’ General Election, a map such as this with genuine input from voters represents a fine way for people to raise issues and offer perspectives on the campaigns. Politics isn’t just about broadcasting, I venture. It’s a conversation.

So far, from what I’ve seen, nobody unrelated to the three local campaigns has contributed to the Argus map. That’s a real shame.

As I have often said to businesses large and small over the years, the social media secret is letting go. Give up control and let other people chart the course of your journey. Even to someone like me involved in politics, this map shouldn’t be yet another channel we use to skew the discussion by showing how omnipresent and marvellous the parties are. It must be an opportunity to listen. Let’s follow the roadmap rather than draw it. Just for once.

This map will be all the more informative and intriguing if the party people leave it alone and ensure it’s a forum and outlet for the people that matter to express a view. I think we should let democracy breathe. I’m looking forward to day two… and three… and beyond…

Disclosure: I am a rank and file member of the Labour Party in Brighton Pavilion. These ain't nobody’s views but my own.

I'm not sure Dr Lucas has seen her very own Brighton & Hove Bus around our City's streets and it seems likely she missed this conversation I overheard only hours ago on the number 25. Here are both. It's a public service.

"Yeah. Hi. It’s Caroline. Wassup? You know what it’s like, right? You’re like running around Brussels and Strasbourg doing your job and then a journalist starts dissing you, right? You totally want this shiny new job in London (it’s a promotion) and annoyingly right you have to go to Brighton every now and again to meet the people who are going to hire you. It’s, like, a nightmare! And then the local newspaper in Brighton slags you off for being out of touch ‘cos you don’t know how much a bus ticket costs. I know! Quelle bore!

Ok. So it’s a mistake. A little typo. My staff make typos like all the time. And what’s twenny pee right when you earn €84,000? If you say a daily bus ticket is £3.80 and they say it’s only £3.60: you’re all saving already right! They should get that. Everyone can take a chill pill. It’s all on expenses anyway! £28k a year in travel expenses is like totally normal for people like me. You don’t claim expenses? You should!

Someone should ask those hacks on the Argus. Yeah, they should. Yeah. The hacks that live in Brighton and Hove. Yeah. AND the bloggers. What are the bus fares in Brussels? I bet they don’t know! KILLER QUESTION! You mean it doesn’t matter? Yeah it matters! I live in Brussels!"

I have taken part in so many demos and protests that I can hardly keep count. The highlight was opposing the Iraq war in London on that February day in 2003 with a million others. But that was vanilla. I’ve faced up to police as they’ve beaten their shields with their batons with the sole intent to intimidate. I’ve been filmed and snapped by the rozzers before anti-terror legislation was enacted. I’ve mass-trespassed. I’ve squatted. I’ve been questioned, jostled and jibed by coppers. I’ve seen the underside of a police horse closer than I ever want to see one again.

The demos have been for causes various. I was against apartheid and shutting Brighton’s St Luke’s Pool (aged 9) in the 80s. I passionately opposed the CJB/CJA and French nuclear tests and other things in the 90s. More recently I’ve opposed student tuition fees and the Iraq war. I could mention direct action against fox hunting and car rallies on the South Downs. I even joined my mum to protest about midwife pay once.

But I never hid my face.

Protest is about standing up, being open, speaking out, hopefully raising the profile of the cause or issue, and being counted. For me, a protest doesn’t have to be legal but it must have peaceful intentions. I know how demos turn out. With opposing forces of protester and police, sometimes it gets edgy and ugly. As a protester, sometimes you get arrested. Usually you don’t. But passion doesn’t mean aggression. Violence should never be an aim.

That’s why I can’t support the Smash EDO action and protesters. Not only is the case unproven but they seek to make it anonymously. Any group that goes out and protests behind scarves and balaclavas is hiding something. That’s not how we should do it here. Protest must be proud to be credible. Ask Gandhi, Pankhurst, Mandela and King.

The thing about the second coming? Yeah, totally agree: thank goodness Brighton's "godless".

Rememberance is important every year, but recent losses in Afghanistan made it even more keen to mark the day this year.

Recently, I started collecting postcards of Brighton and Hove and I picked up these two images recently. It feels like a good day to share them.

I particularly liked one installation called Circa 69 Sinking Ship, which I've posted below. Based on the premise that people in 2069 have worked out how to send a television signal through a wormhole created by the Large Hedron Collider to us right now, it's the future news. I looked really brilliant projected on a wall in black and white. It also made me laugh rather a lot.

Bring on White Night 2011!

wormhole transmission 24/10/09 from Simon Wilkinson on Vimeo.

Spotted in Hove recently...

Rejoice! The church has sent another missionary to save us godless Brightonians! Our new saviour comes in the shape of the ever so trendy Reverend Archie Coates. He knows what we need: more god. He’s so wrong.

When it comes to beliefs and religions we’ve got plenty. It’s just not necessarily Church of England or god based or even formal worship but we do have spirituality. Just see the crystal and mystical shops in the North Laine, Jedis on the census, Hare Krishnas jiving down Western Road, consider Brighton and Hove’s Jewish community, we have mosques and temples, the quiet Bahais near Preston Park, even the burning of the clocks on the winter solstice. You can even argue that radical politics forms a civic religion. Our souls are nourished in a myriad of ways.

When Rev. Coates calls us “godless” he means that we don’t have enough of his god and he thinks that, by extension, has resulted in social decay. But the established church has had a chequered experience in Brighton and has never been at the centre of the city’s culture.

From Conversion to the 17th Century...
I suggest that there is something in the heritage of Brighton that means the established church has given way to religious and spiritual plurality. Rev. Coates follows in the footsteps of St Wilfred who was attacked by belligerent Pagan locals when he tried to land in Sussex in the year 666. He didn’t return as a missionary for another 15 years. Despite our relative proximity to Canterbury, dense woodland and the treacherous weald proved tricky to penetrate. Augustine became the first Archbishop of Canterbury in 598 and yet Christianity may not have been widespread in Sussex until the 8th century, long after many more distant people in England had converted. We were slow starters on the Jesus thing.

Thinking more specifically about Brighton, the mother church St Nicholas’ has Saxon roots and is recorded in the Domesday Book. There was a small monastic institution where the Town Hall is now, an offshoot of Lewes Priory, but it was likely insignificant. What is clear though is that in the small maritime town of Brighton between conquest and reformation, religion wasn’t a dominating force. The little town literally clung onto survival with attacks from the French (Brighton was burnt down in 1533) and the constant onslaught from the sea.

In 1650, the population of the town is estimated at 4000. St Nicholas’ was the only church in town and there is no way even half the population could have squeezed in to what is quite a small building. In the middle of the seventeenth century, Brighton was the largest town in Sussex. Compare it to Lewes, which would have been smaller in terms of population. Lewes has at least half a dozen churches at that time, many of them bigger than Brighton’s sole church. This strikes me as clear evidence that Brighton’s people were not much troubled by churchgoing and formal religion.

It’s in the seventeenth century too that we see Brighton’s religious diversity emerge. A religious census of 1676 records 1740 Anglicans in the Brighton parish, 260 dissenters and not a single catholic. It wasn’t necessarily a tolerant time though. In 1658 a Quaker meeting was disturbed by Anglicans returning from church. Windows were broken and one worshiper was thrown out of town. One of the attackers was a woman with a bible. The Quakers established their first dedicated meeting house in central Brighton in 1700.

Enter our Patron Scientist and Patron Sinner...
Fast forward to 1750 and I think we learn a lot from the two ‘founders’ of modern Brighton: Dr Richard Russell and George, Prince of Wales, later Prince Regent and King George IV. Our Patron Scientist and Patron Sinner. Russell popularised the sea water cure and established Brighton as a resort town. The Regent developed that with his patronage in the following decades and attracted aristocratic and fashionable visitors.

The Regent ordered the building of the Chapel Royal near the Pavilion reputedly because he couldn’t be bothered to go all the way up the hill to St Nicholas’. It opened in 1795 and was only the second Anglican church in town at the time. He later gave up worshipping there too after a sermon offended him. Despite becoming later head of the Church of England, it’s worth remembering that the Regent bribed a vicar to marry him illegally to the Catholic Mrs Fitzherbert and that seems emblematic of his view of religion.

So Russell establishes Brighton as a kind of secular Lourdes and the Regent reinforces the town’s reputation for hedonism. The town expands dramatically and by 1818 the population is roughly 18000 (and that’s presumably greater when swelled with visitors) and yet there are still only two churches with 3000 places and a handful of chapels for dissenters. Clearly the majority of Brightonians could not have been godly church goers during this period. And such was the concern the vestry (essentially the council) resolved in 1818 to build a new church, St Peter’s was built between 1824 and 1828.

Only the enthusiasm of the Revs. Wagner in the 19th century bucks the trend. They oversaw a massive expansion in the burgeoning Victorian town and we can thank them for the great church buildings of St Martin’s, St Michael’s, St Bartholomew’s, St Paul’s and the lovely understated Church of the Annunciation on Washington Street. And while there may have been a boom in churchgoing for a while, it was their Victorian, patrician zeal that means the city has had a surplus of pews for bums far exceeding demand for a long time.

Not godless just less god...
The nineteenth century also saw the coming of the railways. After 1841, and to the present day, Brighton became a popular holiday resort and a daytrip destination. I think it’s fair to say that they don’t come here for god. I don’t think anyone ever came here for god. They come here for fun and sex and drink and drugs and excess and escape. Brighton is raffish and has a reputation for naughtiness and it’s certainly one of the reasons I love it.

My point is that Brighton’s long history shows that unlike many other places, this city is not an overtly godly place by Rev. Coate’s terms. The results of the 2001 census show we have fewer Christians and fewer churchgoers than anywhere in Britain. But it’s not a weakness. It's not an illness to be cured. Rev. Coates has come to lead the “re-evangelisation of Brighton and transformation of this society.” I think he’ll find that it’s easier said than done because the church has rarely been an agent for change round here.