Profiting from a busy season on the English Riviera

IF YOU happen to be a holidaymaker reading this column, thank you twice over.

First of all, thank you for buying the paper. We appreciate it. Local newspapers all over the country need people like you, prepared to dig into your pocket or purse to buy a copy. Well done, you.

Secondly, thank you for coming here on your holidays. No, really: thanks. We love you.

We may have a funny way of showing it sometimes. You’ll hear people grumbling darkly about ‘grockles’ when they can’t get a table at their favourite pub, and there might be a helpful hand gesture or two when you get flummoxed working out which lane you want to be in along the sea front or in that tricky switcheroo by the bus station in Paignton, but we don’t mean it. We adore you really.

A colleague and I were both late for a meeting in Torquay the other day. We had both seriously underestimated just how long it would take us to get across the busy bay.

“You can’t move along the sea front and round the harbour,” we said. “It’s total gridlock out there. Brilliant, isn’t it?”

We are both children of the Sixties and Seventies, the heyday of the holiday resort, when most of the UK beat a path to our door in the days before you could fly off to France for a fiver or see the golden beaches of Spain for next to nothing.

A whole new resort full of people arrived every Saturday, changing places with the previous week’s guests who were wending their happy way home, sunburned and skint, and we would gleefully part them from their hard-earned cash in the gift shops of Torbay Road.

We sold them phoney horoscopes, plastic hats with saucy slogans on them and toys that fell to bits the minute you took them out of their boxes. They didn’t seem to mind.

We sold them teeth-rotting rock and saucy postcards to send home to their family and friends. We satisfied their need for ashtrays and toast racks with little seagulls, lighthouses and local scenes on them. We sold out of plastic macs on days when it rained.

Now, once again, you can’t see the grass on Torre Abbey Meadows or Paignton Green for fairground rides, and you can’t get a clear run along the sea fronts for people ambling about in the road clutching ice creams and takeaway coffees.

The principle is the same as it ever was. You come here with money and we take it off you. In return, we give you everything you need to have the time of your life until it’s time to go home again: but it’s all good, because this is exactly what Torbay was designed for. It’s what we do and, judging by the number of people in town right now, we do it pretty well.

I don’t understand people who moan. Without visitors – without you there, clutching this newspaper – we wouldn’t have half of the things we love about the place anyway.

You, by the way, should come back again next year, or maybe chuck in an extra visit in the autumn when it’s quieter – and make sure you buy a paper.