There’s a photograph I treasure of my late mother and me at Southend. We are both ankle-deep in moss-coloured water, sea foam puddling at our legs. I am about three years old, my chubby fingers sealed around the flimsy handle of a shiny red bucket, a fake plastic policeman’s hat, complete with golden braid, balanced lopsided on my head, while a frilled swimsuit droops around my shoulders. My mother’s beige trousers are rolled up to her knees while splodges of water blot her pale T-shirt. Seaweed lies in front of us on the beach like matted hair, its pods blistering the muddy surface. In the background, a grey-haired man in a worn woollen waistcoat and rolled shirtsleeves balances his flannelled bum precariously on the rail of The Dreadnought pleasure-seeker. Mum and I are both smiling.

And so my love affair with the British seaside began.

When we were kids, growing up in 1970s Romford, we couldn’t afford holidays abroad. I don’t think anyone could. Claire Watkins in the 5th year went to Disneyland in Florida, and she was treated like a minor celebrity. I remember her coming back to school looking like Olivia Newton-John, honey-blonde hair against a rosewood tan, in a fluffy pink Minnie Mouse sweatshirt and baseball boots. We younger girls all crowded round, eager to know what the land that had brought us Fame and Ronald Reagan was really like. ‘Did you meet Mickey/Mr T? Was it scary going on a plane?’ Claire answered our questions in her newly acquired Texan drawl, until an older boy, striding past the gaggle of girls, decided to put her in her place: ‘Oi, Claire! You look like a Paki!’

Her face fell for a moment and then she carried on, ignoring the insult. I tried not to bristle, my sister and I being the only ‘Pakis’ in the school. The lesson: holidays abroad may seem glamorous but don’t try to act better than you are, or someone will knock you right back down.

Which was a shame: we could have done with more Claires and tales of different, Technicolor lands. Grey concrete was the bulwark of my childhood: concrete subways, concrete fountains, concrete flats. Even the Dolphin swimming pool with its much-vaunted tidal wave machine (on twice a day, between 9.15-10.15am and 4-5pm), was a huge grey edifice in the middle of a roundabout.

So trips to the coast were a chance to experience a magical landscape unlike anything I’d ever known. The seaside had everything: sand (possibly), shingle (most definitely), and waves (the tidal machine was never switched off).

It instilled in me a real hope that things could be better…