Simon Calder: The Man Who Pays His Way

Abba's claim to fame? They began in Brighton..

The A23 is one of Britain's least attractive trunk roads, snaking south from London's dreary suburbs through Hooley and Horley, throwing a loop around Gatwick airport and somehow managing to steer a morose course to the sea through Sussex's delightful countryside. The entrance to Brighton is anything but grand, sneaking beneath a vast, brutal flyover. But you know you are there, because beside the roundabout a display of winter-flowering polyanthuses announces "Welcome to Our City".

Brighton people are a touch possessive about "Our City", believing that they have the good fortune to arrive at the closest approximation Britain has to southern California. But who exactly are Brighton people? That is what the city's new Walk of Fame sets out to answer.

Hollywood started the trend, immortalising stars of screen, stage and music in the sidewalks. Vienna picked up the idea to create a Music Mile, commemorating great European composers. Even Little Havana in Miami has the Calle Ocho Walk of Fame, a celebrity hike paying tribute to noted Cuban exiles.

Now it is Brighton's turn. The beginning of the Walk of Fame, Sussex style, is just behind the Asda petrol station in the Marina. The end is barely 100 yards away. For a small city of 200,000 people, a list of just 100 local heroes is only to be expected. Even to get that far, the man behind the venture has had to stretch definitions.

The founder of the Walk of Fame is David Courtney, whose main claim to fame is that he discovered the Seventies singing star Leo Sayer (unkind folk might call that a claim to infamy). Indeed, Mr Sayer pops up near the start, even though he hails from the rival resort of Shoreham. "He was living on a houseboat with 15 hippies when I found him," says Mr Courtney.

Abba, Sir Winston Churchill and Imran Khan are rarely mentioned in the same sentence. Yet each has a tablet embedded in Brighton's paving. The band that brought the world Dancing Queen and Fernando earned its place because, "Their career started here in 1974 when they won the Eurovision Song Contest." The man who, last Sunday, was voted the Greatest Briton went to prep school in the town (as it was before 2000), while Imran Khan played for Sussex County Cricket Club.

Anita Roddick makes an appearance, even though the Body Shop is based along the coast in Littlehampton, because the first Body Shop was born in Brighton. Alan Partridge, in the form of local resident Steve Coogan, is commemorated, as is Des Lynam. Even the local paper gets a look-in: the Evening Argus has its own tablet.

The WHO, as most sad old houseboat-living hippies will know, hail from Shepherd's Bush in west London, yet they find themselves with a foot-square patch of Brighton to call their own. Early in their career they played the Florida Rooms on the seafront. I ventured off-piste and aimed west to try to track down this exotic venue, only to discover that it has been turned into the Sea Life Centre. I won't get fooled again.

How do you like your guidebooks – accurate and enlightening? Me too. But I also like them to be written by people whose prose I can comprehend.

The new edition of its New York City guide is one of the most important books Lonely Planet has ever published, given the acute interest in, and sensitivity about, September 11.

The author is Conner Gorry, who I am sure is a delightful woman. Yet all you learn from the first line of her (auto-) biography is that she has a "boundless passion for Caribbean islands that subvert the dominant paradigm".

I was at a loss to relate this to writing a guidebook to America's largest city, but read on: "Despite holding a BA in Latin American Studies and an MA in International Policy, real life provides her real education: from chronic aloha contracted in Hawaii to dancing with demigods in Cuba." With these excellent qualifications for guidebook writing, how does the author fill her time? "These days she lives, loves, writes, gains faith and discovers mysteries in Havana and New York."

At last, a reference to the subject of the guidebook, even though it takes second place to the Cuban capital. With the "author blurb" out of the way, it is time for a gush of acknowledgements, though with the qualification, "While I've been known to jive to my own drummer...".

Nearly three years after London phone numbers changed to the 020- prefix, Ms Conner has been too busy jiving to her own drummer to notice that the numbers she quotes in the "Getting there and away" section are unavailable.

The book itself may be unavailable, at least if you look on the shelves of some of central London's leading bookstores. "It's unbelievable – we put them on the shelves, and everyone watches them like hawks, but half-an-hour later they've all been stolen." The assistant in a London bookshop is explaining why guidebooks from Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, Dorling Kindersley and Time Out are no longer on display; you must ask at the counter.

In publishing circles it is said that homeless people are paid £5 for each guidebook they steal from the shelves, by characters who then sell them from a white van in various parts of London to the public for two-thirds of the cover price.

How strange that, of all the books in the world, it should be travel guides that have acquired the value of a precious commodity like saffron or cocaine.

"Fog in Channel – Continent cut off", went the famously Anglocentric headline in The Times. Last week, though, the effect of fog in the Thames Valley resounded as far as the Nile. My colleague, Lucy Gillmore, checked in at Heathrow at noon, in good time for the once-a-week EgyptAir flight to Luxor.

Unfortunately, the Jumbo was still sweltering on the Tarmac in southern Egypt. The reason, so passengers were told, was that the captain was unwilling to take off from the sunny Saharan skies while fog was lingering over London. Yet one characteristic of morning mist in the capital is that it forms before dawn and is burned off reasonably quickly.

The flight was due to leave Luxor at 7.15am, British time, at which point Heathrow was shrouded in gloom. But the scheduled flying time is more than five hours. It was a fair bet that, by lunchtime, the fog would clear – as proved to be the case.

Even though the airline knew of a serious delay well before many of the outbound passengers had left for the airport, it chose not to call them to alert them and allow them to make more constructive use of their time than hanging around at Heathrow. Instead of lunch over the Rhine and dinner over the Nile Delta, passengers got meal vouchers for TGIFriday's.

When the plane finally left, shortly after midnight, Ms Gillmore decided to celebrate with a drink – only to discover that EgyptAir is "dry".

Every captain carries extra fuel for contingencies, such as flying around in circles waiting for fog to clear, and then diverting to another airport if it lingers. Passengers aboard Ryanair's flight to Strasbourg were glad about both when the captain spent 90 minutes in a holding pattern above the Rhine, before diverting to the German city of Saarbrücken. Worse was to come for passengers on later flights. Although the fog faded, two deer appeared on the runway and proceeded to halt operations. Perhaps extra rations of venison could persuade French air-traffic controllers to take less industrial action.