I have always been a dreamer, but in no aspect of my everyday existence is my fantasy life more active than when it comes to holidays. For years now, I've dreamt of enjoying a proper British seaside holiday, though not, I should add, the kind I enjoyed as a child, when my granny would take us to places such as Pontin's at Morecambe Bay, where my brother and I would bully her into letting us live for an entire week on Walkers French Fries and fizzy pop.
No, the kind of holiday I play over in my mind like an old home movie takes its inspiration, I suppose, from all the Famous Five stories I once read: immaculate beaches, secret coves, high tea. Plus, a few things "remembered" from elsewhere: crazy golf, blustery piers, proper mint choc chip ice cream. In my mind's eye, I see my adult self spending an August afternoon rock pooling, after which gentle activity I retire, fresh freckles decorating my nose, to a gracious yet surprisingly affordable hotel, where I am fed a delicious supper of lemon sole which came out of the North Sea only that very morning.
Last month, I decided to make my dreams come true. It seemed, finally, as though this could be possible. The pages of The Good Food Guide suggested that the restaurant revolution had spread sufficiently far out of our cities that we would actually be able to find something good to eat in a seaside town. Meanwhile, every newspaper told me that more people – cash-strapped and otherwise – were taking their holidays in the UK.
Lastminute.com, for instance, revealed that its domestic holiday bookings were up 16% year on year. Most fatally of all – fool! – I bought a copy of Coast magazine, which serves up the British seaside as if it were simply a gorgeous lifestyle choice, just like minimalism or living in a loft. I looked at its photographs of a perfectly preserved Fifties ice cream parlour called Morelli's, in Broadstairs, with its Lloyd Loom chairs and its Italian water fountain, its sundaes served in hand-blown glasses and I thought: that's it! That's where we're going! "Tie the requisite knots in your handkerchief!" I shouted to T, racing to the telephone to book a hotel. Oh, how we laughed.
Have you ever been to Broadstairs? It is lovely. It has excellent crazy golf, a bandstand and a cute half moon of a beach. Over it all looms the brooding Bleak House, beloved holiday home of Dickens. No, I won't hear a word against Broadstairs. My beef is with what tourist board people refer to in marketing meetings as its "offer", by which I mean its hotels and restaurants: the package. We had booked a weekend at the hotel where – how we loved this idea – Dickens wrote Nicholas Nickleby. Unfortunately, it is also where my dreams began merrily to shatter. From the moment we walked in the door.
On reception was a woman, hot and cross and sour. She did not use the word welcome, nor too many other words, come to that. She merely grabbed my credit card. The phone rang. "Go away!" she said, furiously. When the ringing persisted, she told the person on the other end that she was "too busy" to discuss room tariffs.
At £120 a night, this is not a cheap boarding house. But it felt cheap. It is a long time since I have heard the dull thump of scarily institutional-looking fire doors in a £120 a night establishment and even longer since I left such a place, as we did two days later, without anyone saying: "How was your stay?" or even: "Goodbye."
At breakfast, I sat on the hotel's terrace, which looks out over the harbour and I thought how perfect the place could be. What was the food like? I can't tell you because, beyond tea and toast, we decided not to risk it. (Laminated menus are never a good sign, are they? How are you meant to accommodate the catch of the day on a laminated menu?) Nor could we find anywhere for dinner in the town. Or at least, not if we wanted to eat fresh fish, which seemed a reasonable enough desire, given our, er, proximity to the sea. Instead, we drove for 40 minutes to the Sportsman in Seasalter, where we devoured oysters and turbot, marvelled at the briny freshness of both and resisted the temptation to kiss the landlord by way of thanking him for his Kentish missionary zeal.
I can't tell you how low all this made me feel. There was just no getting away from it: the aching gap between what many of our seaside towns are really like and the way they could, and should, be has not disappeared, or even narrowed, after all.
Amazing, isn't it? These benighted resorts will never have a better opportunity than this summer to prove to people that they are worth visiting again. We are all here, a captive audience, waiting to be entertained. But by this time next year, the economy will have improved. People like me will think of what we endured in Blighty and book our holidays abroad.
Broadstairs and the rest need to seize the moment, to put away their microwaves and their frozen scampi, this minute, before it is too late. Come on, guys. It's not as though a crab sandwich, with butter and good brown bread, is hard to make.
In our £120-a-night bedroom, the management had elected to hang a sepia photograph of better days on the wall: the promenade crowded with elegant ladies with their parasols. I stared at this for a long time, first melancholy creeping over me, then hot anger. How strange it is, insulting even, to point out past glories when you have nothing even approaching a plan for the future.
