On the subject of motorcycles, I was never a "rocker", but I was an all-year-round commuter and long-distance motorcyclist for 32 years. Brighton featured in my first-ever motorcycle adventure, which is notable if only because nothing like it could ever happen in these days when getting started on a bike is fraught with so many bureaucratic obstacles: age limits, ridiculously small engine capacity limitations, compulsory basic training, theory tests and the like.
As an impecunious vehicle-less 20-year-old student at Bath University in 1969, I was offered a bike by a fellow student whose home was in a village near Dorchester, Dorset. I accepted and travelled down on the back of his machine to pick it up. I had never ridden a motorcycle before in my life, but in those days anyone over 16 could purchase a 250cc model, put L-plates on it and ride it away, having merely obtained a provisional licence and third party insurance. This was exactly what I did. I paid the £20 for his 1959 Norton Jubilee 250, rode it up and down his front drive once to get accustomed to it, and then rode it 160 miles to Brighton to visit my mother in hospital. The journey took me about five hours. On the following day, following a bitterly cold night spent sleeping beside the bike in a field near Hangleton, I rode the 140 miles back to my digs in Bristol. My, I was hardy in those days.
As a Brightonian I have made many trips since to the old home town, but as far as I can remember I never again made the journey by motorcycle!