I am in Morecambe, the very embodiment of slightly faded gentility – and similar, in that respect, to so many resorts around the British coast. This is where the crowds used to come in their thousands, once upon a time. Coachloads from all over the region would come for an excited day out or week away. Barbara Crowther, a retired nurse, remembers: “You didn’t let go of your mum’s hand, it was so busy.”
Now, those crowds are just a memory, even in the height of summer.

Even when the visitors come, few dream of dipping more than a toe in the water, and probably not that And now, there is yet more bad news. A newspaper hoarding succinctly announces, in the run-up to bank holiday weekend: “Shame of Lancs Beaches.” True enough: the latest edition of the Good Beach Guide, produced by the Marine Conservation Society, shows that water standards in the north-west have failed to meet basic targets.This week, the European Commission issued its own latest Bathing Water Quality Report, demanding that countries pull their seawater socks up. The EU has two standards that should be met – the mandatory minimum, and the guideline values. The European Commission complained that “only” 84 per cent of bathing areas across Europe meet the preferred guideline values Nobody in Morecambe would use the word “only”.

In the north-west of England, 84 per cent would seem like a dream figure to aspire to. Here, none out of 34 sampled beaches passed the guideline European standard, according to the Good Beach Guide. One of Morecambe’s beaches failed to meet even the mandatory target.Traditionally, the great thing about the British has been that they didn’t much care whether things worked properly or not That was true in every sphere of life. It wasn’t about comfort and quality, but about muddling through. Why wash your hands under a single tap in comfort, when you could install two separate taps, under which you can wiggle your mitts from side to side in a scald-freeze, scald-freeze hand-jive routine? Why eat fresh food, when you can get processed instead? And as for bathing beaches: why bother about cleanliness and amenities, instead of simply taking pride in the fact that you are At the Beach? That’s what being British was all about. That was the essential knack of maintaining a great empire – that we didn’t complain about what we found at the beach.I know; I was there I grew up in the 1960s in a small seaside town in Dorset In winter, the beach was (and is) fabulously beautiful.