When you're around fifteen years old, you often become convinced that everyone where you live except for you and your friends is a smelly old person, there is nothing to do in your home town except swig cheap cider in a park and chuck it up some time later on and that the big lights of the nearest big city are infinitely compelling and should be visited at every possible opportunity, for as long as possible.
I was put in mind of this state of mind when watching an documentary last week entitled The Curious World of Frinton-on-Sea, part of the Wonderland series of documentaries on BBC2. The Wonderland series has been uniformly excellent, featuring a man eating roadkill badgers on Exmoor, a bunch of slightly disturbing Christians touring the Middle East in preparation for the imminent apocalypse and so on. But the Frinton one is easily my favourite.
Frinton is the least seaside-like seaside town in the UK. The residents fought against opening a chip shop (first one opened in 1992) and a pub (first pub didn't open until 2000) and there are no yellow lines or traffic lights there.
The town where I grew up has several pubs and chip shops (and a pier, unlike Frinton) but it doesn't have as many tacky seaside attractions as it's neighbour, Weston (substitute Clacton in the case of Frinton)
Frinton is about the quarter of the size of Clevedon and has around half of its residents over retirement age, whereas Clevedon only manages around 19%. But when you're a teenager, everyone over the age of 21 might as well be over retirement age as far as you're concerned.
In short, an excellent television programme, but one that made me feel like a teenager again and realise that it could have been much worse for me.
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