It’s cold. Like, really properly bracingly sea-air cold. You can wrap up as warm as you like but there’s not a lot you can do about the cold on your face. It forces itself to be felt and it demands your attention, taking your thoughts away for a short time from the crushing emptiness of existence.

The winter sun. During the day it reflects off the sea with the light of a million Christmases, casting a spotlight on completely everything and you realise there is so much to notice and it’s all really beautiful because it’s Brighton and then you realise how great just looking at things is and it gets unbelievably overwhelming.

The sea is really freaking angry. You can watch the waves break from metres away from the beach and storm towards the shore and lash foam around your ankles but you can mock it because the pebbles absorb its white spittle before it gets you and you can feel like a WIZARD-GOD because you’ve beaten gravity.

When it’s overcast and the sky is the same colour as the sea and it looks like a lid over your head or something and you wonder if you’re in the Truman Show and it makes you re-evaluate your whole life.

People really like taking photos of the sunsets or something, well it looks even better in real life than it does on your iPhone screen.

The starlings. They only come out at around this time of year and they fly together in a big flock in a completely random formation around the pier for a few hours before nesting for the night. Numbers are getting smaller and the volume of them isn’t as impressive as it used to be but hey that they do it at all is so unbelievably remarkable and not even SCIENCE knows why they do it.

It’s empty. For some reason no one else has realised any of these things and so unlike in summer when the beach is packed with sunbathers you can put on your stomping boots and stomp around the beach and run as fast as you can and take full advantage of the wobbly pebbly ground beneath your feet.