The case for… Seaside attractions

In a section of this publication devoted entirely to positivity, I’m happy to decry the sea as overrated. It’s big, it’s wet and it stinks. But its attractions? Oh my!

Give me your bawdy cartoon scenes with face-holes cut out. Give me your terrible shell art and eye-wateringly expensive candy floss. Give me your undead hordes of surly teenagers, glowering from kiosks as they sell unlicensed Minions tat, faulty vapes and tokens for the creaking rides behind them. Give me those tokens themselves, coined plastic currency which, in an age of contactless payment, leaves no illusion that this is anything other than a vehicle for profiting off the fact we will buy more discs than we will ever actually use. Give me ghost trains half as scary as an episode of Last of the Summer Wine, Ferris wheels mounted on flatbed trucks and a dodgem arena festooned with barely deducible likenesses of yesterday’s celebrities.

You can age a tree by counting its rings. For a funfair ride you must analyse these inscrutable figures airbrushed on its side. You will not find Sabrina Carpenter or Bad Bunny here. A glance at Britney Spears or Eminem would mark it as one of the newer rides. More likely you’ll find a barely recognisable Cher and a T-100 era Arnold Schwarzenegger, for you are entering a place of vaulted, vintage wretchedness. All of this – its hostile mercantilism, its grasping crapness – is what the seaside was made for: what, to me, any trip to the sea should be made of. A galloping sprint through several geological strata of tack and treats, leaving you with enough memories – and at least four discs of unspendable circular plastic – to last you another year.