ON EASTBOURNE PIER

You might have seen Eastbourne Pier yesterday, enveloped in a huge black plume of smoke, flames licking around the wooden roof. It was ever so sad. This grand Victorian enterprise, a hundred-or-so years old, consumed in a single afternoon. Apparently, people simply watched from the beach in silence. I can understand that.

I wonder why the Victorians built piers? I suppose it was simply a novel thing to do, to extend the promenade out to sea, where you could look back at the seaside, or the surging waves between the planks beneath your feet. Or perhaps they saw a more commercial opportunity?

In that golden age of engineering and innocence, I imagine stuffy men in starched collars dreaming of whole networks of wooden structures, sprawling out into the ocean, providing little cities on stilts: shops, amusement arcades and entertainments, sweets, iced creams and penny-slot machines. The likes of Margate, Blackpool, Brighton, Eastbourne would have them - jutting out from the beach, where cloth-capped workers, fresh from the glimmering railway, would step out with their bonneted belles.

"Will you hold my hand, dear William?"

"I don't know, Miss Bessie. I'd certainly like to but I'd be a feared of what it might be meaning. Plus me hands are awful grubbed from the railing and I think you should like to keep yours pristine shouldn't you?"

It's a very different world isn't it? The age of cast iron and wood is long gone, consumed by the raging fires of modernity, eroded by the ocean of change that always laps at these shores. Those top hats and enormous sideburns, those cravats, parasols and fascinators have long since perished from our sorry old world, leaving only the sepia-toned memories and the distant sound of the honky-tonk piano.

And these grand old piers. Walking along them as child, almost felt like stepping into a unique world, back through time to the heyday of my parents' grandparents, growing up in that golden age of the seaside holiday. They'd be saddened probably, if they knew that their favourite pier had become a shell of mangled iron and smoking embers. I hope it's OK to feel sad for them too.