hen I was 12, or thereabouts, my granny took me, my brother and my sister to the seaside for the week. For her, this was a great treat; a widow since before we were born, she loved to be with us, and she loved the feeling she was treating us. But we were perhaps a bit more ambivalent. Our treat came with… complications. Granny was blind, and new places were tricky for her (not that she’d ever admit it). Additionally, she was a terrible snorer. In a holiday park chalet only twice as big as a bus shelter, the chances of us getting a decent night’s sleep – or any sleep at all – were slimmer than a Wham bar (original raspberry flavour). But we’ll come back to Wham bars. The point is that we went to Withernsea, in the East Riding of Yorkshire. This was not a glamorous place. At the time, I’d barely heard of it – why, I wondered, couldn’t we go to Bridlington? – and in the decades since, I’ve never met a single other person who has ever been to the town, let alone stayed there for a whole week. Google it, and you’ll find that its greatest claim to fame is the fact that it’s the birthplace of the actress Kay Kendall – and who’s heard of her, these days? (Please don’t write in; I adore Kay Kendall, though perhaps not quite enough to visit Withernsea’s lighthouse, which now houses an exhibition devoted to her.) But I digress. No, Withernsea, was not glamorous. On the first day, I gazed out at the gunmetal North Sea, and thought sulkily of those friends lucky enough to be taken to Spain. God, life was so unfair. And yet, I’ve never forgotten that place, with its pier towers that look like the turrets of a castle. It’s always with me. I cherish the memory of my granny, who let us have ketchup with lamb chops, and I tend to hold it (meanly, perhaps) in my mind when I hear spoiled 21st-century children talking about their all-expenses paid holidays abroad with mummy and daddy, as if such things were a human right. Above all, though, it has for me become a kind of symbol; even, perhaps, an allegory. Those chilly, haphazard days, at once both quite boring and replete with illicit delights, are the British summer holiday of yore in microcosm: its absolute crumminess; its ineffable perfection. Thinking of one particular picnic we had on its wide, dun-coloured beach, our skin goosepimpled and our toes glazed with damp sand, I’m apt to come over all Marcel Proust (save for the fact that where he needed a plump madeleine, shaped like a scallop and soaked in tea, fully to stir his remembrances, I ideally require a homemade corned beef sandwich, a bag of Walkers French Fries and, for afters, a Blue Riband wafer). An exquisite pleasure invades my senses, and for a brief moment, yes, the vicissitudes of life become indifferent to me, its disasters (almost) innocuous. Don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m on about. Especially in this moment. For haven’t our thoughts turned even more than usually to the past during this long, sad lockdown? My sense is that many of us, if not most, are retreating, to various degrees, into a certain nostalgia. In large part, this is because the future is so uncertain. There’s comfort in how things used to be; seeking it out is a perfectly natural thing to do in a time of collective mourning. But perhaps, too, it has to do with the fact that the future is going to look quite a lot like the past, at least for a while. This summer, after five decades of package holidays and low-cost flights, most of us will be holidaying at home – just like we used to. (As the former MP Nicholas Soames puts it, albeit with some overstatement, in British Summer Time Begins, Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s new book about the long school holidays, once upon a time “no one went abroad, except to fight a war”.) People, then, are getting ready: for bad weather, bad roads and, quite possibly, bad food. If you’re my age, and from my kind of background, you remember both states: the nirvana of, say, one’s first visit to France, with its remarkable yogurts and its even more remarkable cheese – and the rather less transcendent experience of “breaking your journey” to the Lake District with roadside Dairylea cheese triangles and an orange Club that you would try not to throw up later as your dad made heavy weather of every gear change, and your mum tried not to cry on account of her map reading having been described as “absolutely bloody rubbish”. I was nine when I first went to France on holiday, and 25 before I stepped foot in any other foreign country (save for Israel, but that doesn’t count because we lived there). The vast majority of my childhood holidays were spent in the UK: at the seaside with my granny; in a cottage in Northumberland and at other rented properties (see also, youth hostels) in the cold, damp north with my mother and stepfather; and in a hotel in Cumbria with my dad. Occasionally, my stepfather sends me and my siblings digital versions of the zillions of slides (believe me, they were all the rage at one time) that can be found in his attic, and they always make us hysterical with laughter. The meagreness! The deprivation! The chilblains! It’s like a Monty Python sketch gone wrong. It’s like Oliver Twist, only with baked beans and Orange Maid lollies. (My stepfather, incidentally, used to add curry powder to baked beans, the better to make them taste… more exotic.) Ah, yes. The food. It was quite bad, and quite limited, and yet we enjoyed it so much. Well, sort of. In hotels, it was always the same. To start: fruit juice, soup or pâté with toast. To follow: some kind of roasted meat with some kind of sauce, and soggy veg. Pudding was trifle or (that great multipurpose word) “gateau”. In seaside places, you ate fish and chips. Or… fish and chips. In holiday cottages, it was pretty much like a weekend at home: spaghetti hoops on toast, say, or tinned tomato soup. Camping? Camping was hell. The least comfortable weekend of my life was spent at Ingleborough in North Yorkshire. We went with another family, and they (the lucky bastards) had a camper van, from inside of which they watched us, hot tea and biscuits in their hands, labouring over our guy ropes in the howling wind. Biscuits, by the way, were the ultimate holiday food, easily transportable and consumed in vast quantities in all the above places. Like an army, we marched on them. I was mad for Viscounts and Breakaways (the biscuit equivalents of champagne), but I could also put away my body weight in squashed flies and custard creams (the biscuit equivalents of pomagne). I remember eating out hardly at all. In most places, there was a Chinese restaurant, and an Indian. But for some reason, these were for “locals”, not visitors. I guess there were other places, but either they were very bad indeed, or prohibitively expensive and not for us; the casual dining trend, at which it’s so easy to sneer (but I never will), was still far in the future – pizza was fairly hard to come by – and even middle-class families were so much more careful, not to say parsimonious, then. Pubs did food – well, sandwiches and ploughman’s lunches – but if you were a kid, you had to sit outside with your slab of cheddar, your pickled onion and your small cow pat of Branston (guzzling your limeade, you wondered, almost fearfully, what kind of debauchery was taking place within – did it also involve vinegar?). No, away from base, packed lunches were the thing. I still thrill to the phrase “packed lunch”, suggestive as it is of Sandwich Spread and Salt’n’Shake crisps – though there was always the fear that my mother would include a stinky hard-boiled egg (in my memory, she was obsessed with hard-boiled eggs, secreting them away absolutely everywhere, including her handbag). Cut to 2020. Things have changed unimaginably. You never used, for instance, to see much seafood on the coast, bar those little polystyrene pots of sharp cockles to be eaten with a wooden fork; what was not battered went elsewhere. These days, though, you’re apt to find it all over the place: in shacks, and cafes, and restaurants; even in fish and chip shops, sometimes. The word “langoustine” trips from mouths as easily as the word “saveloy” or “pasty”. Lovely bread is easy to come by. The smallest, rural places often have good delis and proper sandwich shops. And there are good restaurants; special restaurants, in fact, whatever certain metropolitan critics might have you believe. I know a place in Northumberland not too far from the dank cottage where we used to spend long afternoons communing with our biscuits, where you can eat the kind of things that used only to be available in France: local meat, game, fish and cheese; exceptional salads. Except – I can hardly believe I’m writing this – the cooking is miles better than it would be in France now, where something has gone badly wrong (but that’s another story). And yet… this summer is different, freighted for all of us like no other with complex emotions and the high stakes that are the inevitable result of having been cooped up at home for so long. I think we’ll be after every delight available to us, up to and including lamb shanks and nettle risotto. But we will also want – we will also need – various other things, too: the foods of our pasts, soothing and slightly comical and mostly happily inexpensive. I can’t speak for you, but I know what I want when I’m done with all the moules marinieres and Cotherstone cheese on sourdough, with the smoked this and the salted caramel that. I’m thinking of crinkle-cut chips and FAB ice lollies; of shepherd’s pie eaten after walking in the rain, with frozen peas and those little tinned carrots, salty sweet, that I haven’t eaten in thirty years; of a parma violet or a Refresher, lodged below my tongue until it melts. I would like to eat a mint Viscount once again, peeling back the foil slowly. I quite fancy – I can hardly believe I’m writing this – some tinned ravioli, or a bag of iced gems, neither of which I particularly liked the first time round. I could really go for a steak pie, followed by a custard slice. At the pub, let there be two bags of scratchings, one for now and the other for one pocket of my waterproof (in the other, inevitably, would be some liquorice comfits). I want to go back to where we began, a Wham bar (original raspberry flavour).