Holidays are missed, kids grow up, people die...
When I was a kid, my school reports often referred to me as a dreamer, meaning I spent an inordinate amount of my time not learning, but looking out of the window. I’m not sure what I might have been daydreaming about, but thinking back, it was probably, certainly in the summer months, the prospect of a holiday on the south coast of England and all it might entail: trips to what was then called Perdido’s (it’s now the Lobster Pot, a beachfront cafe); swimming in the sea; playing with a toy yacht (Star Yachts of Birkenhead, proper sailing boats); and building sandcastles on the beach and trying to hold back the tide. As a young kid I also used to fantasise about owning enough land to run a small railway, one of those small-scale locomotives found in amusement parks, and this later morphed into owning my very own ghost train that all visitors would have to use to reach me inside. This particular fantasy involved me waiting for my guests in the living room and them arriving through two wo...