Arriving in Blackpool by train is just as I’d always dreamed. At the Pleasure Beach station, I disembarked right by the roller coasters, which rear up like Welsh hills beside you and, with the seagulls, welcome you with shrieking riders and clattering wheels. There are vast coasters in wood and metal weaving in and out of each other. Curvaceous and sprawling, they’re Gina Lollobrigida in steel.

I’ve wanted to visit Blackpool for years. Spending my early childhood near Clacton-on-Sea, I got used to the delights of a tacky seaside town, and Blackpool is surely the mother of them all – even if it’s a mother with too much blusher and mascara on, who looks as though she’d scratch your eyes out if provoked. The town as we know it was constructed in the second half of the 19th century, with its three piers, trams and famous Eiffel-inspired Tower (at 518 feet, it was then the highest structure in the British Empire). Blackpool still attracts over 20 million visitors a year. If she’s gaudy and vulgar – a ‘great, roaring, spangled beast,’ as author J.B. Priestley called her – no one is complaining.

I found a childish inner voice urging me to put off my journey home and do it all over again

As I walked down the Golden Mile, the seafront promenade, it didn’t disappoint. From the South Pier, crammed with moving rides, Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ echoed out ghostly over the Irish Sea. It was an overcast autumn day and the whole of the town seemed touched with a sulphurous yellow light. There are old-fashioned joke shops selling hand-buzzers and stink bombs (‘If you can’t take a joke, don’t come in!’) and fortune-tellers’ booths where there are seers and ball-gazers. There are endless boarding houses with names like ‘Chimes of the Sea’ or ‘Viking Hotel – Talk of the Coast’, and banners outside advertising events.........

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