I stayed in Worthing last night due to work, the first time I've ever stayed in the town itself. I've visited the office I was visiting in Worthing a few times before, but have always previously arranged to stop overnight among the bright lights of Brighton, thinking to myself that was where "it's at".

But you know what? Worthing's gorgeous. At least, on a glorious, sunkissed-night as last night was, it is. My hotel was on the front ("Parade") itself and I would say the sea view was one of the finest I've ever found anywhere in Europe, if a panaroma of a wide expanse of gently rolling sea lapping a miles-long expanse of untouched beach is your thing (it is mine). And far from being a backwater of shuffling, dispirited pensioners grumbling their way from shabby pubs into bingo halls (as I'd been led to believe) the main strip of pubs and little cafes and restaurants was delightful. I had one of the nicest Thai meals I've ever had in this country outside London, in a little place on Montague Street.

Given that hotel prices are about half what they are in Worthing's livelier, more vibrant neighbour up the coast, I'd wholeheartedly recommend it. Maybe the superb evening sunset and the fine meal I'd had just put me in a fantastic frame of mind for a chill-out evening on a hotel veranda overlooking the sea. Or maybe the place is simply overlooked as a tourist destination because it likes to remain 'secret'.

Superbly, absolutely all of the locals talk like Len Goodman off Strictly Come Dancing. The posh ones just like him, the coarser ones just like him, but with a few more "Facks" and "Wankas" than you'd hear in his Saturday night judging comments.

And Worthing being 10 miles/minutes away from Hove (and Brighton), you couldnt give 'us' a shout?

Wanka.

The GLW works in Worthing hospital and in a GP practice a little up the road in Goring-on-Sea. She's less fond, if truth be told.

It's certainly nicer than Hastings, though.

From a tourist perspective, as opposed to actually having to live there, Hastings is very attractive. I was surprised to find it so, given that the national news coverage of the place in the context of the Billie-Jo murder had generally gone with the spin that it was a run-down Giro-on-Sea full of the washed up dregs of society living in squalor and hopelessness. But the old centre is very attractive, with the elegant regency (?) terraces on steep slopes as featured in the Foyle's War sets, those weird tall dark wooden things for the fisherman's kit on the beach, and the castle on the hill. I've a nice photo of Lady Mauleverer in Hastings taken the day we got engaged a couple of years ago (which occurred some hours later and about 20 miles further west on the Seven Sisters cliffs).

Worthing, for me, will always bring to mind a day in the 1980s early on in my brief career at the Inland Revenue, when I went down from Somerset House to visit perhaps the same office that Rogin mentions he had business with recently. I had been on the point of signing up for a career option which combined the head office policy work with an accountancy training element. When I had spent a few hours in that Worthing Office at which I would have had to spend months doing said accountancy training, I dropped that career path like a hot brick. To say that the Worthing office accountants I met lacked the intellectual sharpness of my head office policy colleagues would be like saying that Socrates noticed that his Garforth team mates weren't quite up to the level of the Brazlian national teams he'd played in. I shudder when I think I nearly ended up there.

My dear old mum lives in Worthing. I've no idea why she chose to move there after coming back from Spain(note to self, ask her why on next visit). Anyhow, she likes it.

I like to visit, though I can't imagine living there. Couldn't afford to anyway.

Like Rogin, I enjoy sitting in the nice bars on the sea front, sipping a cold one and watching the world go by. And this is from someone who likes real ale and my pubs a little rough around the edges, it must be the sea that does it.

Well, my dear old mum is currently extremely unwell in Worthing Hospital's High Dependancy Unit, so I've been seeing a fair bit of the place in the last couple of weeks, and I have to agree with Rogin. As British seaside resorts go it's very pleasant: well-maintained and attractive. Surprisingly large too.

And that stretch of coast is, of course, the best in the country for crazy golf courses.

I swear that I saw an elevated crazy golf course in Littlehampton a few weeks ago but I may well have been hallucinating.

Purves Grundy wrote:
It's certainly nicer than Hastings, though.

If the English language didn't already have the phrase "damning with faint praise", I think we'd now have to invent it.

I just cycled out to Worthing on Saturday. It did seem nice. Almost ran over a few small dogs along the seafront.

Is "having small dogs along the seafront" one of the nice things about it?

Worthing is the only place in the UK where I've actually stayed in a private home. The rest were hostels back-packers' flops and whatnot. It was lovely. Very....er....British. There was a car show on the....green, I think they just called it...where you could pay in pounds what we pay in dollars for the same car. WTF, I said to myself, and others.