Oh I do like to beside the seaside

A day at a British seaside resort is one of my favourite ways to while away an afternoon. As a child, I always enjoyed my annual visit to Southend-on-Sea, every eastender’s favourite ‘resort’. A walk along the Golden Mile, putting a few coppers in a penny-falls machine in the Kursaal arcade, a stroll to the end of the pier (it’s the longest in the world, dontcha know?) and back while munching on a stick of candy floss, and half an hour in Peter Pan’s Playground. What more could an eight-year-old want out of life?

I returned about five years ago after an absence of almost two decades and my rose-tinted memories were given a given sharp dose of reality. The quaint Peter Pan’s Playground had evolved into a behemoth now known as Adventure Island, with ear-splitting Europap and hordes of marauding Vicky Pollard look-alikes. The Kursaal had been redeveloped for housing. Even the name of the town suddenly seemed a laughable misnomer. Southend-on-Sea? Shouldn’t it be Southend-on-the-polluted-Thames-estuary?

But for some reason, my trip rekindled my affection for traditional seaside resorts, and I decided to visit more of these quintessentially English anachronisms. Last year, I made my first trips to Whitby and Scarborough. The former was more of a fishing village (and quite an upmarket one at that), but Scarborough was everything that I had hoped it would be. In fact, I got so caught up in the atmosphere of the place, that I spent four hours in an amusement arcade playing a penny-falls machine (in some ways, I’m still the same as I was during those annual visits to the Essex riviera), having somehow convinced myself that the mobile-phone handsets sitting on top of the rows of coins were real. Seven plastic phones and £18 later (yes, that’s a lot of 2p pieces), I realised the folly of my ways.

So last month, when my parents, brother, sister-in-law, nephew and niece headed up to Caister-on-Sea (not the Thames) for their annual holiday, their caravan park’s proximity to Great Yarmouth persuaded me to join them for the last couple of days.

My last visit to Great Yarmouth had been in 1981, when we had stayed at the same holiday park. All I remember about the resort was that I had bought a Madness trilby (which I’ve still got). Twenty-eight years is a long while, but from the moment I arrived in the town until the moment I left, I had an absolute ball.

The first thing that I saw as I walked towards the sea-front were several crown-green bowls lawns, populated by scores of immaculately attired elderly me (and a few women) enjoying the late-summer sunshine and some competitive sport. After a few minutes enthralled by the action (it’s a strangely addictive activity), I started walking along the promenade. And to my delight, I was soon ticking off every cliché with gay abandon. Donkey rides on the beach. Tick. Multi-generational families of sun-reddened, tattoo-covered chavs with rolls of flab bulging out of their obscenely scanty clothes. Tick. Bouncy caste populated by overexcited toddlers. Tick. Two piers (anything Southend can do…). Tick. Pensioners with tartan rugs over their knees, drinking flasks of tea. Tick. Overpriced funfair with a haunted house and various sick-inducing rides. Tick. Gaggles of underdressed girls tottering around in inappropriate footwear. Tick. A high street dominated by tattoo parlours and rock shops. Tick. Countless amusement arcades with grandiose, Las Vegas-style names. Tick.

If they ever produce one of those yellow spotters’ guide books to tacky (and I use that word in an affectionate way) seaside resorts – and they used to make them about the most boring subjects, such as ‘trees’ – I’ll be the first to buy one. The only thing missing was someone rolling up their trousers and swapping their ‘kiss me quick’ hat for a knotted handkerchief, before going for a paddle in the sea.

I feasted on a tray of chips drenched in salt and vinegar while walking along the promenade, followed by a huge Mr Whippy, all washed down with an 85p cappuccino sitting in a plastic garden seat (who needs Starbucks?). And I was so enchanted by the whole experience that I totally forgot that West Ham were playing Spurs (I had timed my return from China to coincide with the start of the football season), one of our biggest matches of the season, live on Sky.

It was one of the most enjoyable days I’ve had for a long time. Even if I didn’t find the shop where I had bought that Madness trilby.

Chinese puzzle

In all my travels, I have never visited anywhere that is more a mass of contradictions than China. It may be the world's fastest-growing economy and on its way to becoming the 'powerhouse of the east' , but as a country, it is caught uncomfortably between the 21st century and the 1950s.

The fruits of the economic boom are everywhere. China is home to the world's tallest building (Shanghai World Financial Center), the largest dam (Three Gorges), one of the most iconic stadia (Bird's Nest) and the second-fastest passenger train (the Maglev, which can reach speeds of 270mph). A beer costs £5 in Shanghai, while it's £100 to cuddle a panda in Chengdu.

But on other development indicators – such as democracy, human rights, healthcare and the environment – China is making negligible progress or even moving backwards. It has a per capita wealth similar to that of Namibia, while 500 million rural Chinese do not have access to clean drinking water.

The 'great firewall' may have come down to allow unrestricted internet access for the duration of last summer's Olympics (at which China won more gold medals than the US for the first time), but Beijing's 30,000 cyber-police (Chinese checkers?) were just enjoying an extended tea-break, and a quarter of websites are blocked. Hence me having to write this travelogue retrospectively (is me bemoaning the lack of single women on my trip really a threat to Communism?) and asking Legon to update my Facebook status (so the literals weren't my fault). Type 'Tiananmen Square' into Google and all you get is a tourist guide to the square – all references to the events of 1989 have been airbrushed from history.

Trying to engage somebody in a conversation about the political system is met with an ashen face and a solemn declaration that such a subject is taboo. Every day, our guide had to make a list of where every member of the group was, for official purposes, while foreigners are allowed to stay in only designated hotels. And our itinerary had to be altered because the government didn't want us going anywhere near Tibet.

On a day-to-day basis, the country manages to continually surprise. Even on the busiest street in Shanghai, people stop and stare at Westerners. As our Chinese guide spoke to us in English, we were surrounded by locals of all ages. They came so close, I thought they were going to start poking us with sticks. Young children do not wear pants and sport trousers with long slits in that allow them to go to toilet where they stand (parents do not take them somewhere discreet to do their business – I witnessed a baby having a number two on Beijing's main shopping thoroughfare and another having a wee in the middle of a 10-deep queue to get into Chairman Mao's mausoleum).

Then there is a perplexing etiquette system. Every night at dinner, our guide castigated us for 'crimes' such as standing up to serve ourselves food from the lazy susan or lifting our bowl off the table. 'Chinese people wouldn't do it that way,' was her continual refrain. Yet while serving themselves from the communal dishes, everybody dropped food (including her) from their chopsticks (which had been in the user's mouth), only for someone else to pick up those same pieces, as the table revolved. No wonder a cold spread between all 13 of us within a couple of days.

The food itself also took some getting used to. We ate as a group almost every night, feasting on up to 15 dishes for about £3 per person. But the guide, who did all the ordering, had to ask for dishes to be brought 'without bones', much to the perplexity of the waitresses. We had lunch one day at a farmer's house, which was all very nice until the final dish came out – chickens' feet. Most of us couldn't disguise our repulsion. But our 25-year-old guide jumped up beaming and was soon gnawing away on the 'delicacy'. Mind you, she did carry a vacuum-packed duck's neck in her rucksack, in case of an emergency. On the rare occasions, usually breakfast, that she wasn't with us, we all ended up in McDonald's.

Queuing, as it is in many parts of the world, is an alien concept. But never have I seen so much barging, as people jostle for position. I'm ashamed to admit that after a month of being pushed from pillar to post, I lost my temper when someone attempted to eject me from a left-luggage queue – while I was being served at the counter. I finished my business, then flung the perpetrator to the ground. In England, I would have found myself in at least a slanging match (and probably a lot more). But the bloke accepted it graciously. It was as if he expected it – a case of 'live by the sword, die by the sword'.

I don't think I've ever been to a noisier country. More than 1.3 million people talking in a whisper would be loud enough. But everyone barks at the top of their voice – into their phones, to people standing next to them, into their lover's ear (I don't think you can whisper sweet nothings in Mandarin - Chinese whispers is something very different). It's as if they are all continuously having an argument. One lunchtime, a waitress rushed over to our table and bellowed a couple of sentences. We thought there must be a problem with the bill, until our guide told us that she had just come over to tell us it was raining.

Finally, and for many of us most alien, was the propensity of men to spit everywhere. And I mean everywhere – restaurants, train carriages and shops. And we're not talking a dainty spitting out of chewing gum – this was the hawking up of 'greenies' from the bottom of their lungs that would have put Kenny Everett's Sid Snot to shame.

But it wasn't only in the practices of the locals that China made an indelible impression on me. As someone who is lucky enough to have been to almost 60 countries, I often myself underwhelmed by sights that guidebooks eulogise about. However, the Great Wall (the West Bromwich Albion footballer who, during a tour of China in 1978, reputedly opted for a lie-in in preference to a visit to the architectural wonder, with the comment, 'seen one wall, seen them all', was misguided) and Terracotta Warriors certainly lived up to expectations. I even had the privilege to have met the only survivor of the three farmers who stumbled across the warriors' tombs while digging a well in 1974. In fact, his presence persuaded me to spend £10 on a signed guidebook (it will be worth a few quid on eBay one day) I would otherwise never have bought. The frail old man, who must be in his eighties, was taught to sign his name solely to wring a few extra yuan from tourists. The cynic in me couldn't help but wonder whether all three farmers had died years ago, and the man who signed my book was just the chosen extra that day from the Xi'an amateur dramatics society.

Experiencing a five-minute total eclipse in a perfectly clear sky, when almost everywhere else in the area was shrouded in cloud, while on the Yangste River was also unforgettable. I only wish that I had been able to make the journey up river before the Three Gorges Dam had been built, when the cliffs were several hundred feet taller and the valley far narrower.

On a more personal level, I taught myself to use chopsticks in two days (it was either that or go on a crash diet) on what was my fifth trip to Asia; won my name written in Chinese characters in a game of musical chairs; was part of a 'choir' that performed a Chinese love song on a ship's stage (it didn't win me anyone's heart – hardly surprisingly, as I am tone deaf); and learned to count to 100 in Chinese (don't ask me to write it, though, as there are more than 56,000 characters in the Chinese language – I pity their poor sub-editors).

The only downside was the recurrence of a serious eye problem (I almost lost sight in one eye in Peru eight years ago), which meant that I couldn't open it for the final two weeks of the trip. I thought my luck was in when we reached Xi'an and checked into a hotel that was a five-minute walk from an eye hospital. But the quality of the consultation left a lot to be desired (the door to the treatment room was open and a stream of people came in to ask to the specialist questions while he was examining me). My long-standing problem wasn't even picked up and I was diagnosed as having an 'eye infection'. I was prescribed three types of drops and cream, which I had to administer 15 times a day (not easy when you're hiking the Great Wall). But they only served to make the problem worse and it didn't start to heal until I threw them all away. As I said earlier, for a country developing at such a pace, the quality of healthcare was frightening.

All in all, it was a memorable trip in so many ways. But the size of the country (we did four train journeys of at least 18 hours), the heat and humidity, and the language barriers (at train stations you couldn't even read the departures board – it was little wonder that we encountered only four people travelling independently in the course of a month) meant that at no stage did I feel that I had China in my hand.