When you live in a seaside holiday location it’s all too easy to take the views, facilities and ambiance of your own town for granted. I guess it's a minor case of familiarity breeding contempt.
Take my home town of Whitstable for instance; it’s a small, pretty seaside town with a working fishing harbour and a population of 30,000 that nestles into a small, pebbly cove on the Northeast coast of Kent.
Barely five miles north of the historic cathedral city of Canterbury, 20-odd miles from the ports of Dover and Folkestone and a 60-mile commute to London, it is the place I call home.
Our compact former railway workers’ cottage lies just 300 yards from the beach, yet I’ll admit, I’d become a little blasé about the place until a recent readers’ poll in The Times newspaper voted our little town into the top 20 places to live in the United Kingdom.
It stunned me that people all over Britain aspired to live here! So why is it that Londoners buy weekender homes here and holidaymakers flock here, snubbing seemingly more exotic destinations all over the world, to take in the sights of Whitstable?
Allow me, a relative newcomer to the town, to tell you.
