Our Love of the Wet Weekend - by Dea Birkett

The instinct when it’s cold and wet outside is to stay inside, to hunker down. That’s the image of the Happy Family, sitting closely together around the flickering fire.

But very few of us have fires anymore, and huddling around the radiator somehow doesn’t have the same ring. So when it’s wet and windy, we don’t stay in, we go out. And we usually go to the wettest, windiest place we can find, which is usually the British seaside.

Last weekend it was Brighton. In the summer, the pier is most unpleasant. You can’t move for bags of hot doughnuts attached to human arms, walking along the creaking planks. But it winter, there’s no queue for this sugary treat. There’s no queue for the Hook a Duck. And a cup of tea in a polystyrene cup in the cutting wind tastes like the best drink you could ever have. My twins are big tea drinkers – have been since they were tiny. I think it’s part of the whole seaside experience.

We ate at Regency Restaurant and stayed at the Hilton Metropole (www.hilton.co.uk) for the sea view. The water’s never blue this time of year, just a solid wall of silver. But we could still spot surfers, immune to the weather like we wanted to be.

At the risk of sounding like Grumpy Old Woman when I’m still in respectable mid-youth with young children, I think we’ve all become a bit wimpish about breaks. In the winter, weekend break has come to mean Madrid, not Margate. But there’s nothing wrong with the South Coast on a cold day. In fact, we prefer it.

See related article: A Rainy Seaside Family Break to Brighton