“OLD folks, families and corporate delegates meet club-loads of determined drinkers… a frenzy of massive party zones, full of angels with L plates and blokes in frocks, blond wigs and slingbacks.”

For once, this isn’t a description of the Echo newsroom on a Friday afternoon but a respected travel guide book’s appraisal of our ‘sleepy’ little seaside town.

And isn’t it wonderful that people see us this way? A seething smorgasbord of fun and frolics that caters for every social group?

Perhaps not, but it’s certainly a big difference from ‘blue rinse Bournemouth’ or ‘God’s waiting room’, highly derogatory labels that confused the town in the minds of anyone who’d been here during the 60s and had never come back.

Guidebooks like The Lonely Planet and The Rough Guide rarely have a good thing to say about what they see as traditional coastal resorts and we are often very wrongly mixed up with the likes of Eastbourne, Hastings and Torquay as out-dated and anachronistic.

Truth is, we are a beautiful resort but one with a night-time economy that critics could quite easily dub ‘Blackpool with class’.

And as my daughter will doubtless testify after returning home in the early hours of Sunday having celebrated her 21st birthday in style, this is a place that is as far removed from my first family holiday destination here in 1964 as can be imagined.