Hastings: Seaside Secondhand & Dishermen

I love the English seaside, especially out of season. No idea why, but I like overcast pebble beaches, eating candy floss on benches, deserted crazy golf and gaming arcades. So a surprise pre-birthday weekend away to Hastings and St Leonards-on-Sea, next door towns full of bric-a-brac shops and Formica tabled fish'n'chip places, was very well chosen indeed. Here's the view from my bed at the brilliant Hastings House this morning:

And what a bed - perhaps the biggest, comfiest one I've ever slept in. Add in free Jaffa cakes with the room's tea and coffee, a rainforest shower and wallpaper that could be ants or dancing girls, and it's kind of surprising we even went out.

Going on the evidence, Hastings is a perilous place. The Fishermen's Museum wasn't so much a museum as a roguish gallery of foxy earring'd coves in yellow waders that we nicknamed Dishermen. I must have been in awe, cos I forgot to photograph any of them, but did take a pic of this delightful flag.

Next door, the Shipwreck Museum was a grisly but fascinating trip through all the buried ships, treasure and lives still out there at sea, including the bones of an 18th century cabin boy murdered during a mutiny, plenty of intact muskets and bottles of Dutch gin.

The New Town isn't great, but the Old Town's a patchwork of tobacconists, cafes and bric-a-brac stores with insanely cheap crockery, furniture, books and just plain Stuffs (you'll need to rummage though).

Shops that were too dark for photos but worth a look - Pearl & Queenie (fancy jewellery), Wardrobe (secondhand designer), Antiques Warehouse (everything, from £1.50 enamel Lenin badges to £400 leather sofas), Robert's Rummage (books, maps, glassware), and Little Treasures (ladies vintage with a 50s/60s skew). My favourite, though, was the websiteless 20th Century Design, and their £20 Sixties coffee tables and £8 sets (sets!) of Babycham glasses.

St Leonards is much smaller, like a limpet spooning onto Hastings for dear life, but equally worth an explore. St. Clements dishes up slow cooked meat, local fish and a dessert menu that has me slobbering over my laptop in memory. Love Cafe was one of those endearing hippie free-for-all places with Tai Chi ads, chummy servers, paintings everywhere, high-strength coffee and crepes nicknamed 'Johnny Depp'.

And, next door, we found the best secondhand shop ever, the kind that makes me want to charter a van to stock up on ridiculous bits of Sixties tat that I do not need at all. Look - Russian language posters! Cheapo G Plan furniture! Bakelite phones!

Luckily, they don't have a website, so I'm just going to cross my fingers that absolutely nothing sells until I have learnt how to drive a van. Ahem. Last night I was so relaxed that I fell asleep watching Arrested Development in my glasses. It might even have been before midnight. What a great weekend.