I made an anguished face. I had a throat like sandpaper. I was miles from anywhere and there was noone around. At that moment, by a kind of miracle, an icecream van came trundling down the hill playing a twinkly tune and set up at the edge of the car park. I waited an impatient ten minutes while the young man in charge unhurriedly opened up various hatches and set out things. The instant the window slid open I asked him what he had to drink. He rooted around and announced that he had six small bottles of Panda Cola. I bought them all and retired to the shady side of the van, where I feverishly removed the plastic lid from one and poured its lifesaving contents down my gullet.

 Now I don't want you to think for a moment that Panda Cola is in any way inferior to Coke, Pepsi, Dr Pepper, SevenUp, Sprite, or any of the other many flavoured drinks that unaccountably enjoy a larger patronage, or that serving a soft drink warm strikes me as remotely eccentric, but there was something curiously unsatisfying about the drinks I had just acquired. I drank one after another until my stomach was taut and sloshing, but I couldn't say that I actually felt refreshed. Sighing, I put the two remaining bottles in my rucksack, in case I had a syrup crisis later on, and continued on my way.A couple of miles beyond Kimmeridge, at the far side of a monumentally steep hill, stands the little lost village of Tyneham, or what's left of it. In 1943, the Army ordered Tyneham's inhabitants to leave for a bit as they wanted to practise lobbing shells into the surrounding hillsides. The villagers were solemnly promised that once Hitler Was licked they could all come back. Fiftyone years later they were still waiting. Forgive my disrespectful tone, but this seems to me disgraceful, not simply because it's a terrible inconvenience to the inhabitants (especially those that might have forgotten to cancel their milk), but also for poor sods like me who have to hope that the footpath through the firing range is open, which it is but occasionally. In fact, on this day it was open 1 had prudently checked before setting off so I was able to wander up and over the steep hill out of Kimmeridge and have a look round the clutch of roofless houses that is about all that remains of Tyneham. When I was last there in the late 1970s, Tyneham was forlorn, overgrown and practically unknown. Now it's become something of a tourist attraction. The county council has put up a big car park and the school and church have been restored as small museums, with photographs showing what it was like in Tyneham in the old days, which seems kind of a shame. I liked it much better when it was a proper ghost town.

 I know the Army needs some place for gunnery practice, but surely they could find some new and less visually sensitive location to blow up Keighley, say. The odd thing was that I couldn't see any sign of devastation on the hillsides. Big red numbered signs were scattered strategically about, but they were uniformly unblemished, as was the landscape around them. Perhaps the Army shoots Nerf balls or something. Who can say? Certainly not I because my diminishing physical resources were entirely consumed by the challenge of hauling myself up a killer slope that led to the summit of Rings Hill, high above Worbarrow Bay. The view was sensational I could see all the way back to Poole Harbour but what commanded my attention was the cruel discovery that the path immediately plunged back down to sea level before starting back up an even more formidable flanking hill. I fortified myself with a Panda Cola and plunged on.

 The neighbouring eminence, called Bindon Hill, was a whopper. It not only rose straight up to the lower reaches of the troposphere but then presented a lofty upanddown ridge that ran on more or less for ever. By the time the straggly village of West Lulworth hove into view and I began a long, stumbling descent, my legs seemed able to bend in several new directions and I could feel blisters bubbling up between my toes. I arrived in Lulworth in the delirious stagger of someone wandering in off the desert in an adventure movie, sweatstreaked, mumbling and frothing little nose rings of Panda Cola.

 But at least I had surmounted the most challenging part of the walk and now I was back in civilization, in one of the most delightful small seaside resorts in England. Things could only get better.

 CHAPTER NINE

 ONCE MANY YEARS AGO, IN ANTICIPATION OF THE CHILDREN WE WOULD one day have, a relative of my wife's gave us a box of Ladybird Books from the 1950s and '60s. They all had titles like Out in the Sun and Sunny Days at the Seaside, and contained meticulously drafted, richly coloured illustrations of a prosperous, contented, litterfree Britain in which the sun always shone, shopkeepers smiled, and children in freshly pressed clothes derived happiness and pleasure from innocent pastimes riding a bus to the shops, floating a model boat on a park pond, chatting to a kindly policeman.

 My favourite was a book called Adventure on the Island. There was, in fact, precious little adventure in the book the high point, I recall, was finding a starfish suckered to a rock but I loved it because of the illustrations (by the gifted and muchmissed J. H. Wingfield), which portrayed an island of rocky coves and long views that was recognizably British, but with a Mediterranean climate and a tidy absence of payanddisplay car parks, bingo parlours and the tackier sort of amusement arcades. Here commercial activity was limited to the odd cake shop and tearoom.

 I was strangely influenced by this book and for some years agreed to take our family holidays at the British seaside on the assumption that one day we would find this magic place where summer days were forever sunny, the water as warm as a sitzbath and commercial blight unknown.

 When at last we began to accumulate children, it turned out that they didn't like these books at all because the characters in them never did anything more lively than visit a pet shop or watch a fisherman paint his boat. I tried to explain that this was sound preparation for life in Britain, but they wouldn't have it and instead, to my dismay, attached their affections to a pair of irksome little clots called Topsy and Tim.

 I mention this here because of all the little seaside places we went to over the years, Lulworth seemed the closest to this idealized image I had in my head. It was small and cheerful and had a nice oldfashioned feel. Its little shops sold seasidetype things that harked back to a more innocent age wooden sailboats, toy nets on poles, colourful beachballs held in long string bags and its few restaurants were always full of happy trippers enjoying a cream tea. The intensely pretty, almost circular cove at the village's feet was strewn with rocks and boulders for children to clamber over and dotted with shallow pools in which to search for miniature crabs. It was altogether a delightful spot.

 So imagine my surprise, when I emerged freshscrubbed from my hotel in search of drink and a hearty, wellearned dinner, to discover that Lulworth wasn't anything like I remembered. Its central feature was a vast and unsightly car park, which I had quite forgotten, and the shops, pubs and guesthouses along the street to the cove were dusty and looked hard up. I went in a large pub and almost immediately regretted it. It had that sickly, stale smell of slopped beer and was full of flashing fruit machines. I was almost the only customer in the place, but nearly every table was covered with empty pint glasses and ashtrays overflowing with fag ends, crisp packets and other disorderly detritus. My glass was sticky and the kger was warm, I drank up and tried another pub near by, which was marginally less grubby but scarcely more congenial, with battered decor and loud music of the Kylie Minogue Shout Loud and Wiggle Your Little Tits school of musical entertainment. It's small wonder (and I speak as an enthusiast) that so many pubs are losing their trade.