Outings have long been a popular part of a seaside resort’s programme, whether they have brought visitors into town to enjoy its facilities and amenities, or taking staying guests by charabanc to see nearby places of interest.

Please read today’s column in silence, guaranteeing that any discussion is in whispered tones. That will create the atmosphere of Gorleston’s public library post-war when I was a child borrower, the obligatory hush ensuring that browsers, researchers, newspaper readers and the forbidding duty librarian were not disturbed by chatter.

It takes very little to jog the memory and prompt a bout of nostalgia. In this latest case, the catalyst was a letter to the editor published in a recent Mercury.

SOME viewers enjoy them, but I am no lover of television programmes in which expert genealogists trace someone’s long lost relatives, with the inevitable tear-jerker reunion.