Do people go on seaside holidays any more? Every summer when I was young, whole families would descend upon resorts such as Rosslare and Tramore, the more affluent to stay in hotels - like the quintessential one in Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot's Holiday: shabbily endearing, and staffed by melancholics - the rest of us in what were called huts or, more genteely, chalets.
What seems odd now about those summer idylls is that it did not matter much to us how bad the weather was - and even the mists of nostalgia cannot obliterate the real mists, and worse, that I remember. Rain or shine, nothing quite endures like the bitter-sweet salt tang of seaside memories. Philip Larkin caught the essence of "the miniature gaiety" of days at the beach, as he did of so much of what is called ordinary life, in his wonderful poem "To the Sea", with its "white steamer stuck in the afternoon" and, in one of the loveliest lines in the language, his evocation of "The small hushed waves' repeated fresh collapse".
Joseph Connolly is a novelist and journalist, and although Beside the Seaside, essentially a picture book with extended captions, has a got-up feel to it - one can almost hear his agent delivering the pitch to his publisher - it is full of small joys.
There are fine contemporary photographs by Joe Cornish which, despite the sumptuous colour tones, convey an elegiac sense of the lost playgrounds of innocence, but they cannot compete with the black-and-white pictures ranging back in time over a century of seaside pleasures.
Just look at the group shot spread across pages 72 and 73, and note especially the girl at the extreme left, looking away with a wistful half-smile, as if the present for her were already becoming the past, turning into the stuff of memory, even as she sits there with her friends, listening to the gramophone on the stones playing for her the music of time.