A Stroll On The Pier

Yesterday afternoon I walked into town and then out to the end of the pier. Eastbourne Pier is a proper high Victorian exercise in fantasy architecture with tea rooms and amusement arcades and booths selling sweeties and glass animals (watch them being made on site!) and the folk-arty work of local creatives. Fishermen fish off the end of it and there's a Coleridgean pleasure dome housing a camera obscura- that I've never known to be open. Since I was last there they've spruced things up and every dome and lion mask has received a treacly coat of gold paint. A pier is a cruise liner that never leaves harbour. You get all the fun and and none of the sea-sickness.

Also admission is free...

I was asking myself whether the seaside holiday was a British invention and I couldn't answer definitively but I rather think it is- and if so then it's up there with Shakespeare and the Beatles as one of our great gifts to the world. And the crowning glory of the seaside holiday is the pier...