I love piers, and it's always sad when another one bites the dust. My favourite is at Saltburn, with its quaint cliff lift. I remember sitting very quietly at the end of the pier on Sunday mornings, hardly daring to breathe, while my dad and lots of other old giffers (to a man with flat cap and pipe or fag in mouth) fished from it. Before that we’d join other locals scraping up sea coal from the beach, using some wooden contraptions on a stick my dad had made. We used to take it home in buckets, dry it out, then pack it in cones of newspaper and use them on the open fire. Probably not the best of money saving ideas, as you used to think when a scrap of red hot mussel shell would explode out and zip past your face of an evening.