Location, location, location - it's an obsession shared by estate agents and novelists. Estate agents are randy for proximity to amenities, whereas novelists are in hot pursuit of something a lot vaguer, something probably best shorthanded as atmosphere. Amenities can be death to atmosphere: a gothic castle would lose approximately 95% of its gothicness if it were only two steps from Costcutter.
About three years ago, I and the narrator of my just-begun novel were in search of a location: Victoria About, successful high-end Chick Lit authoress (entirely fictional, and not based upon any person living or dead, I promise) was desperately putting together her own contemporary version of Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse.
In order to do this, she had decided (I had decided) to bring all the worst-behaved of her friends together for a month in the country, for a seaside August, and then write up the results in a lyrical, romantic, insightful novel. Victoria's guests would, she hoped, fall in and out of love, in and out of bed, and so, over the four weeks, would give her plenty of scandalous and passionate real-life material. To give herself a little technological help in keeping track of their secret assignations and midnight rambles, Victoria intended to have every room in the house (apart from the loos) fitted up with cameras and microphones. Of course, she didn't want her naughty guests to find out about the spying; of course, I was certain they would.
So, Victoria and I were both in need of somewhere in sight of a lighthouse, preferably one not too far from London, and Southwold was just about the first place that came to mind. Because it is a town with the rare distinction of having a lighthouse stuck down one of its back streets, rather than half a mile out to sea. The title of Victoria's novel-to-be became From the Lighthouse, and I was able to make use of some of my holiday-gained familiarity with one of my favourite coastal places.
It's pretty sad, but I always find the turn off the A12 on to the A1095 thrilling. The genre of driving changes immediately, from touring to rallying; an arterial road becomes a narrow country road, dipping, twisting and doubling back. At this point, after a couple of hours in the car, it is incredibly tempting to rip along too fast, to arrive just that half-minute earlier. This isn't because it will be, as with Dover or Brighton, the cresting-a-hilltop first sight of the sea, and the definite start of the holiday; the water has already come into sight just before the turn. It's more that Southwold is one of those places that has remained entirely and unmistakably itself. We've been on the way there for long enough, we think, and now we want to be there. And Southwold, unlike, say, Nottingham or Carlisle, never fails to give me the feeling of being in Southwold. Even its High Street is blessedly unhomogenised.
As we pass Saint Felix and Saint George's schools, my girlfriend is likely to tell me some choice new detail about the Bible Study holidays she spent there between the ages of eight and 11.
We usually head straight for the place we always stay, when we stay in Southwold. We're anxious, and want to be sure it's still actually there. This isn't The Swan Hotel, glamorous and old world as that would be; it's a small self-catering cottage on Ferry Road. If we do make a stop, it's in the market square for bacon, eggs, bread, butter, milk and anything else we've remembered we've forgotten. (Bacon and eggs are important; the body doesn't absorb calories in the same way when it's on holiday - or so I like to believe.) The houses we pass on the edge of Gun Hill always make us think about what it would be like to live here. Ferry Road itself is a narrow strip of Tarmac, heading towards but never reaching the next village down the coast, Walberswick. It is cut short by a large gravel car park and a canal-like inlet overlooking dunes and marshes.
All along the right-hand side of the road are small holiday cottages, some of them formerly fishermen's sheds. The one we stay in is decorated inside with lots of carved wooden birds, and has jungle print curtains - which sounds a bit bizarre or cutesy, but for some reason seems to make us relax immediately we come through the door. Ferry Road, although only a few feet from the water's edge, is protected from the sea by a high ridge of dune.
I realise that I've been describing one Southwold, when, like all seaside towns, Southwold is really two places: Summer and Winter, or perhaps just Sunny and Not-Sunny. In summer, the sea is just the sea; in winter, there's no mistaking that it's the North Sea. Sunrise rather than sunset is the time the beach achieves its greatest glory. We try to make the effort of getting up at least once a holiday. The lion-coloured sand is soft, gently sloping and sprinkled with pebbles and stones. On a fresh, summer morning, the breakers sparkle so brightly that it's hard to look at them; on a winter's afternoon, the stretch is a long, comfortingly muted set of tones of grey and green. Back towards Southwold, the row of candy coloured beach huts starts. It's fun on a morning walk to try and work out how outrageously much they cost, this year.
Jutting out, away from the huts, stands Southwold pier, which was refurbished in 1999. This has a cafe, a bar and a restaurant. It also had a couple of rooms of amusements, some to keep the kids happy (or at least to give a focus to their sullenness) and some more for lovers of the odd and antiquarian. But the most amusing thing on the pier are the hundreds of little plaques attached to the handrail. These were placed there for the private donors who made the refurbishment possible. Some are sad, some amusing and quite often - in a very East Anglian way - surreal. It feels like the longest park bench in the world.
As it turned out, the novel didn't develop quite as I or Victoria had expected it to. Her guests, despite occasional shopping trips into Southwold, and one early visit to the Red Lion, spent most of their time lounging and misbehaving around the house she'd rented for them. This, a mile or so to the north of Southwold, was something I completely invented - or, if it was based on anywhere, it was a handsome Georgian pile that I'd seen not in Southwold but in Walberswick.
The characters did also make one of the excursions which my girlfriend and I always do - they went to Aldeburgh and had stupendously good fish and chips on the beach, fending off seagulls. But there were many more that they missed: visiting Dunwich and chasing the vanishing point down the infinite curve of the beach (I don't believe it ever ends); dropping in at The Maltings in Snape and finding out about the fantastic concert that was on a couple of nights ago, and the one that will be on a couple of days after we've left; driving down to Shingle Street, a beach that is nothing but brown pebbles and brings on immediate existential angst.
For a milder form of this, I like to sit at one of the dusty tables in the Southwold Sailors' Reading Room and leaf through the opening chapters of WG Sebald's The Rings Of Saturn. Sebald seems to have been particularly fond of Gun Hill, an open patch of green where a row of cannon point towards the horizon, defending the coast from all-comers. A slightly older piece of Southwold-related literature is PD James's Unnatural Causes - a copy of which you'll probably find on the shelves of any of the many B&Bs and guest houses. If not, then, tucked away down this lane or that, Southwold has a number of very good second-hand bookshops. And, if we've run out of paperbacks or want to read up on vanished Suffolk, there's the excellent Bookthrift on the Market Place.
S outhwold is stuffed with places to eat, from timewarp tea rooms to burger 'n' chips pubs - so it's a good place to indulge in those non-calorific holiday meals. There's also a number of great food shops: a fishmonger, a couple of butchers and a deli with a different variety of marmalade for every day of the month, almost. As the Adnam's brewery is bang in the centre of town, it seems ungracious not to drink as many of their numerous beers as possible.
Our end-of-holiday food treat is dinner at the Crown Hotel. This is famous enough in itself for me not to have to write much about it. The bar room, with an open fire during winter, is furnished with high-backed wooden benches. The wine list is of the sort that shames people into taking evening courses in viniculture, just so that next time they come they'll know exactly what it is they can't afford.
Once when we were there, we got into conversation with the woman eating alone at the next table. It turned out that she was a judge. When the time came for her to pay, and she had a little trouble attracting the attention of a waiter, I suggested she do a runner. She was so relaxed and content that she seemed, for at least a second, to consider it. I'm not sure in how many other places that would have happened.
Getting there: The nearest railway stations are Lowestoft and Halesworth. National rail enquiries: 08457 484950, Anglia Railways: 08700 409090.
Where to stay: The Swan Hotel, Market Place, Southwold (01502 722186) has single rooms for £65-£70 a night and doubles from £110 B&B. For further information, including details of self-catering accommodation, contact Southwold Tourist Information on 01502 724729.
· Toby Litt is one of the featured authors in Granta 81: Best of Young British Novelists 3, published this month by Granta Books. To order a copy for £9.99 with free UK p&p, call the Guardian book service on 0870 0667979. His new novel, Finding Myself, will be published in June by Hamish Hamilton.
