John Walsh: Tales of the City

Beside the dismal North Sea, I was beset by ghostly nuns, moral dilemmas ... and a dead gull

How was your weekend? Eventful? I thought not. Nothing ever happens over the Easter break, does it? Daffodils dance in the nippy wind, a leg of spring lamb costs £25 and the consumption of 70 per cent Cocoa Solids reaches dangerously eruptive levels. Apart from that, zilch. I wasn't expecting much when we drove up to Aldeburgh to stay with friends. You know Aldeburgh? Charming place. Snape opera house, Martello tower, dismal North Sea, medieval driftwood on the shingle, feral youths riding bikes with no saddles. It's reassuringly ordinary and faintly menacing.

We arrived in time for my friend Jon Canter's local book launch. ("Am I a 'local author' now?" his main character asks in Chapter One. "It sounds inferior to the real thing, as 'local wife' does to 'wife'.") The Aldeburgh Bookshop was packed with locals drinking red wine and chatting in multi-adjectival, book-group mode ("I found the new Sarah Waters most evocative. Evocative and mordant. Mordant and also lambent. Lambent and, er, fondant ...") and behaving exactly like a Posy Simmonds cartoon.

The author suffered the torment, common to book-signings in one's adopted town, of being unable to ask "What name shall I sign it for?" because every buyer expects him to know their name - and if they say, "Actually, it's for my husband/ daughter/ granny/ secret lover in Saxmundham,"he's expected to know that name too.

We dined in a creaking former convent that allegedly pullulates, at night, with the ghosts of reverend mothers noisily praying for the souls of the sleepers. Our hostess was the daughter of a former Home Secretary, the one who used to visit prisons and congratulate the inmates on their lives of crime ("And what are you in for?" "Murder, sir." "Splen-did!"). Her husband admitted to being a book dealer, in an aghast, confessional tone, as though forced to reveal that he slaughtered baby seals. The more I pressed him about his premises, his stock, his incunabula and his raison d'être, the more uncomfortable he grew, directing all his conversation to the chap on his right, a sharp-tongued 70-year-old German called Dolf, which I expect is short for something.

Morning brought a crisis. Helen, Jon's wife, heard a crash at 8am and discovered an extremely dead seagull outside the house. Oh great - you drive to Suffolk for some healthy air and find avian flu on your flipping doorstep. A responsible woman, Helen rang the Defra Helpline. They guardedly opined that she should dispose of the bird. But didn't they want to inspect it for signs of foul play, fever, muscular aches - you know, flu symptoms? Nah, they said, not really. Was it too early in the day for them to handle an emergency? They ignored the implied criticism. "You must shovel or spade the bird into two bin bags," the voice intoned. "You must wear gloves, and must not touch any part of the bird with your flesh. If your clothes touch the bird, you must wash them."

We brought out two shovels (or spades - was there a difference?) and bundled the elegant white gull with the 747 wingspan into its inglorious black plastic shroud. Triumphantly Jon and I headed for the kitchen, to hear a shriek from the normally unruffled Helen: "Don't bring that thing into the house!" I felt wounded (it's not as if I'd offered to stuff the bloody bird and feed it to the children), but she had a point. We took our burden down the road, under the suspicious gaze of neighbours. Had the Defra Helpline phoned Aldeburgh Neighbourhood Watch? As we tried to find a lead-lined wheelie bin, I could imagine the headlines in the local press ("AVIAN FLU HITS ENGLISH HEARTLAND. LOCAL AUTHOR AND LONDON HACK PROBABLY RESPONSIBLE. LOOK THERE THEY ARE CARRYING IT IN A BIN BAG") but we finally shoved it, un-Christianly, into a town trash-can.

At dinner I met Adam, who was wrestling with a moral dilemma. He was nervous about his father, a deeply serious Catholic thinker whose respect he craves, and he was guilty about his work manufacturing metallic paint for sports cars. For all his success, he could never show his dad a copy of Hot Rods, point to a foxy model draped across a Lamborghini, and say, "This is the career path I've chosen, father." For years, he's convinced his papa he's a mechanic. Now he has a new problem. He's invented a metallic nail varnish that never chips. It will make him a fortune. But how can he tell his father that his life's work has culminated in glossy finger adornment?

I've seldom spent a weekend so full of piquant encounters. I met a chap going swimming with half his moustache-&-beard combination shaved off for comic effect. I listened to a lively discussion about whether it's true what they say in Crap Towns, that the worst sex in the UK takes place in Aldeburgh, and you have to drive a mile out of town to feel horny. I sat between a charming lesbian couple called Gina and Grace at supper. Grace and I discovered we were exact contemporaries at Oxford, class of 1972, as was the Prime Minister. Had she met him? "If you must know,' she said, 'Tony Blair and I went out together for a few months." Nobody asked whether some special event had reconfigured her sexual sat-nav, and, if so, whether Mr Blair had been involved.

Her friend Gina and I talked about child protection and Aids until I felt in serious need of a stimulant. Recognising a huskiness in her voice, I said, "You're a smoker, aren't you? Do you want to come outside for a fag?" "Yeah," she answered, "God, yeah." Her partner Grace was shocked. "You said you hadn't smoked for a whole year," she protested. Too late. Gina had gone and outed herself ...

In the garden we listened as feral youths roamed the streets, flu-ridden seabirds crashed into the converted nunnery, embarrassed publishers and mortified nail-varnishers hurried past each other and the PM's lesbian ex-beloved shook her head sadly at the duplicity of the world. Dulwich seemed very far away.