So I have been living in Brighton for one year and three months now and I do not believe I will ever want to leave - especially not to go back to London. The difference is that Brighton looks like a town which has just had a multiple orgasm; London looks like a city with post-coital tryst.

I first came here in 1986 when I worked for The Mail On Sunday to cover a Labour Party conference and was just so besotted by the place that I never once set foot in the Brighton Centre but instead feverishly cased the whole place all day long, like a burglar. I just wanted to STEAL the whole town and take it back to London with me. Then in the Nineties I started to fall in love with people from Brighton. They seemed taller than other people and they're better kissers too. Frankly if someone's tall, be they man, woman or giraffe, they're three quarters of the way there with me. Charlotte Raven (a Preston Park girl) said she knew she'd nailed me the first time I met her when she stood up and I went "WHOOAH! You're tall, AREN'T YOU?"

So here I am - I came in search of Class A snogging at a great height, and found it. At first my girlfriends thought I'd become a lunatic. I was, after all, the acknowledged queen of The Groucho Club, and had presided over 1001 rubber-necking, Bolly-quaffing, nosepowdering nights there. I was a good Queen, and also a very good actress. Because no one knew that, for at least the three years, I was bored, bored, BORED out of my mind. And the things which bored me most were London men and London traffic.

A few months ago I was reading a piece about girls who were trying to be celibate, and one of them said "Well, I've tried to be celibate three times this year but I live in Brighton so it's a bit difficult." To people not resident in our fair town this might have seemed a bit of a non-sequitur but it made me laugh out loud. It's pretty hard not to have sex in Brighton; everyone seems young, or foreign, or tall. Men in Brighton seem to go straight from being young to being old, which I like. In London, the group of men I call the Rancids - hacks between 30 and 45 who sit around miserably contemplating their novels all day and their navels all night - rule the roost. You can literally SMELL them ON THE TURN.

Brighton's not like that. London men talk and write about sex; Brighton may have it, with bells on. This is a town completely geared around hedonism, and this is why my girlfriends, once they've visited me here, have completely U-turned. My homegirl Suzanne Moore used to scream "Shut UP! Shut UP about bloody Brighton!" whenever I started my familiar mantra - "How do you stand it, Suzanne? Wasting half your life stuck in a traffic jam? Here, you can walk ANYWHERE you like and be there in ten minutes - the clubs,bars, restaurants - if a house is a machine for living in, like old Le Corbusier said, Brighton is a machine for rucking in..."

Then this summer she came down to visit and one night we were sitting in front of Cuba with my very good friend the Perv. I went to the bathroom for a moment and when I emerged I heard a familiar mantra in a strange new voice; "...and you can walk ANYWHERE, that's the beauty of it, not like LONDON where you waste half you life sitting in traffic..." At least she had the grace to giggle in an ashamed sort of way.

And now my friend Kathy Acker, who I so memorably got off with in front of my husband's whole family one happy Christmas Day in the Eighties, is living in Marine Parade and I cannot help but feel that a new Golden Age of Brighton is nigh upon us. Whenever I go up to London now, even right now in the middle of all this Swinging London hype, I just feel so sorry for all those Rancids in the Groucho who scold me for deserting the ship.

But who wouldn't desert the Titanic if they got the chance? The fact which they can't swallow is that I came to Brighton not to escape the fast life, as is usual in deserters to the Home Counties, but to find a FASTER one, one not based around sitting in gridlocks and rotting in the Groucho. And I've found it. I'll tell you one thing; if London DOES swing, it swings only in the manner of the hanged man. In the meantime, ain't WE got fun.