In the British Isles, you are never more than 2 hours from the sea. Unfortunately.

What is the sea? It’s sort of like a big, wet desert that kills you. Yes, it’s nice in some far flung locales – clear, turquoise, inviting, other than the odd bloodthirsty shark. Not here though. Here, the sea is a churning brown slurry full of the sewage we constantly pump out, the temperature of a particularly enthusiastic fridge. Taking a dip is both deeply unpleasurable and a guaranteed source of diphtheria.

The only people who brave a plunge are ‘wild swimming’ evangelists – all maniacs. “It’s a natural antidepressant,” they say, “of course if I didn’t wear this neoprene wetsuit I would die instantly.” Wild swimmers are weird masochists, don’t believe their lies. 500 years ago they would have been lashing themselves with a horsehair scourge, grinning wildly and encouraging you to do the same.

So it’s hard to understand why the nation spends so much time voluntarily visiting the seaside. To try and understand this long-standing mass hysteria I visited the seaside town of Nimby, hoping to catch the sea-bug. Metaphorically.

Like every town in England, Nimby is a goulash of irreconcilable architectural mistakes representing each failed design fad of the last 150 years. There are brutalist eyesores plucked from the planned capital of a failed soviet state, decaying georgian slum housing held together by gaudy-coloured paint, glum brown former-council houses shipped in from ill-conceived new towns, a cheap-looking abstract sculpture in the middle of a roundabout – representing pensioners or aspic or something – and resembling a glassy Curly Wurly left out in the sun too long, a bland undead high street that is indistinguishable from every other provincial high street you have ever seen, a single tasteful old cottage surrounded by oppressive grey bookies – reminiscent of a wide-eyed Year 7 on his first day in Well’ard Comprehensive for Violent Youths, kitsch but-not-in-a-good-way arcades full of mildewed stuffed toys you’ll never win, blank-faced proles shuffling listlessly around until they die.

Imagine all that 50 years after the nukes fall, but with more 12-fingered halfwits.

My sad legs trotted in pace with the locals, down, down, down, a sombre katabasis to the crumbling promenade. I sampled the local cuisine – soggy potato cuboids from an oily card cone, washed down with a Mr Whippy, which apparently cost four pounds now, in a wafer cone that also seemed to be made of card. All the while monitored covetously by scabrous gulls, eyes bulging with jealous stupidity, looking for an easy meal provided by an innattentive child or a frail pensioner. 

Beyond gorging, there was nothing to do. The ‘amusements’ were a farce – I watched a gormless child feed coins into the claw machine, unaware of the obvious futility of their endeavour. A moronic Tantalus guffawing and clapping as he reaches pointlessly for the unreachable grapes: the Gods furious that he is too stupid to appreciate their ingenious punishment.

The pier provided an overwrought metaphor – a wet, decaying road to nowhere, slowly succumbing to thermodynamic inevitability. Not even tall enough to accommodate a lethal leap into the icy surf below. 

Why does anyone visit Nimby? There is no why. Its mediocrity is as evident as every other settlement on our miasmic isle. We simply drift from one to the other at random – the endless Brownian motion of our meaningless lives.