‘I can’t believe you called him Peggy Mitchell!’ She stops, reaching for my arm as she throws her head back, laughing wildly. So wildly that someone across the street turns to look at her.

‘I know. He looks more like Phil,’ I say, stopping as well. ‘What about you, though? When he said we were disgusting.’ I press my hand to my chest and recoil with theatrical horror. ‘Back rolls?’

‘Back rolls!’ she shrieks, so loudly a seagull flies away. ‘I love Alyssa Edwards!’

‘Of course you do. She’s the best one.’

‘Her and Sharon Needles.’

I pull a face as if to say, Of course.

‘This is my cab,’ Poppy says, putting on a cockney accent this time. ‘And I want you two out!’

‘No, posho, it’s aaahhhhhht!’ I correct, like it doesn’t have an O or a U, just a string of As and Hs.

‘Aaaaahhhhhhhht!’ She tries again, succeeding this time.

I’m impressed.

‘Maybe your mum was a Whitehawk girl after all.’ I nudge her with my hip and she cackles.

We stand there, in the street, Poppy doubled over she’s laughing so much. Her hair falls over her face so I can’t see her – only hear her – and I’m glad we’re finding it funny. Or maybe we’re not. Maybe we’re laughing because what else can we do?

As much as Brighton prides itself on how open it is to people like us, it’s hardly the utopia of liberalism and rainbow flags it advertises itself as, so I knew something like this would happen eventually.

The reality of it is sobering, though.

I think of my grandparents then and I finally understand why my mother didn’t say anything when I told her that I was gay. It’s not because she doesn’t approve, is it? It’s because she’s scared.

Like me, she grew up listening to the stories of how my grandparents moved to London from Guyana. About how they saw the newspaper ads from the Mother Country seeking help to rebuild the NHS and London Transport after the Second World War and thought they were wanted, but swiftly realised that wasn’t the case at all. The white nurses took the best rooms in the nursing home and the best shifts and the patients would ask my grandmother for someone who spoke English because they couldn’t understand her accent. And the story of how they met on the bus after my grandfather intervened when a white woman told her to get up so she could sit down. How the pubs had signs that said, No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs.

My mother doesn’t want me to go through what they went through, does she? To be spat on in the street or refused service in a pub. Or, I’m sure, to be kicked out of a cab for kissing my girlfriend.