I first went there when I was eight. For us it was the treat place, the posh place we visited, rather than the place where we actually stayed. We lived in Nottingham then, right bang in the middle of England, and just about as far from any sea as you could possibly get. The three-hour drive to Suffolk – I remember lanes so leafy that there seemed to be a mottled canopy of green over our head – was a drive to paradise.

Every year we returned to the same scruffy country-house hotel a couple of miles from Southwold, now in the news because Gordon Brown is holidaying there. It had sheep and peacocks in its backyard and bats, which we tried (and failed) to catch with our fishing nets, swooping on its dusky lawns. Because he wasn’t keen on crowded beaches, our father insisted on driving to lonely Benacre beach where, once we’d swum in the uninviting grey sea and chased the disorientated, myxomatosis-infected rabbits, there wasn’t much left to do. So on baking August afternoons, hungry again after our boiled egg and greaseproof paper lunch, we’d rejoin civilisation and drive into Southwold for a cream tea.