Joanna Briscoe: A pier in flames is hardly on the scale of an earthquake

What is it about our snuffly, sentimental, Victorian-humping culture that means we're all meant to get terribly sad and solemn when a pier burns down?

A pier in flames is hardly on the scale of an earthquake, exploding disco or Rembrandt theft. The Weston-super-Mare conflagration was marvellous stuff, I say. No one was hurt, and a fine blaze livens up small-town life no end. The place should be grateful that: a) something happened there; b) it finally made the national press; and c) the pier, hardly a national monument, can join the great graveyard of burnt-down piers in the sky. Adjoining plot: Brighton.

Weston-super-Mare. Ah, I remember it well. A townlet of soggy mud flats to be driven through and laughed at, childhood home of the great Jeffrey Archer. As a girl, I lived near it for a while after my London-dwelling parents had escaped to the country to bring up their scruffy-haired kids with access to manure smells and combine harvester accidents. Somerset is the dag end of the universe: flat, creepy, culture-free and almost insultingly dull.

Small-town life is death of the soul, and I still, as a long-term London resident, mentally genuflect with gratitude that I didn't end up trapped in Newton Abbot or Bridgwater or any number of shuddering Sticks-based conurbations. I'd rather have a bolthole in Holloway prison than five bedrooms and a garage in Cutlers Close, Marine Parade,Weston-super-Mare, because at least it would have a London postcode.

Small-town life represents the very worst of everything particularly English: prejudice, petty local government, naff boutiques, terrible furniture, pet shops, and gothic levels of insularity. Oh, the depression of green buses with no one on them, pensioners lunching in self-service cafés, with glimpses of countryside over roofs. And over the past few years, small-town identity has been subsumed by the relentless wash of pretension sweeping the country, so that Cath Kidston peg bags can be found near the mini-roundabouts and fishing tackle shops of many a backwater; an oily focaccia tricolore is now standard instead of a ham sandwich, and a latte can be purchased from Glossop to Portslade. Poshed-up does not equal posh.

Surely grim is better than pretentious. It's more authentic. Small towns used to know what they were: shit heaps; black holes; dozing enclaves of privilege of the Marlow and Henley variety; or flinty little coal-face scabs on the horizon. But they were themselves. Now they're all unified by the flopping panini.

I think one should aim for a life of extremes: clifftops and mountains, or the throbbing metropolis. At least if you live on a Cornish headland you can breed with stray pumas, roger escaped prisoners and cavort naked in the surf. If you live in a capital, you can be high on a perpetual supply of carbon monoxide, global culture, and a concentration of infinitely more interesting people than anywhere else.

Medium-sized towns that fancy themselves as genuinely metropolitan are in some way even worse than their mini counterparts. Chief culprit here, with its grotesquely inflated civic pride, is Brighton. Oh no, correct me. The city of Brighton and Hove. Yes, the newly formed "city" with no cathedral in sight, which is at heart a scuzzy provincial town with a thrusting ego problem. The city-granting committee clearly knew it was neither sufficiently large nor significant to merit the title, so they just welded the nearest dozing settlement on to it. Why not stray further west and form the city of Havant, Bognor, Littlehampton and Worthing? Brightonandhove's jubilant reaction to its new ranking has featured "Don't mess with our city" stickers to go on the waste bins, and "City centre" traffic signs run up in a panting nanosecond. It has all the authentic identity of a former polytechnic blaring away about its new university status. And of course Brighton has managed to get both its piers ablaze.

But the difference really lies in the people. Capital-dwellers have either grown up there and are the real thing, or have escaped more piddling places to converge where it's most interesting. Now when am I to be granted the Freedom of the City of Weston-super-Mare?

Why is holiday envy worse this year? Is it because after a summer of mists and mellow drizzle, we were finally granted a fun-sized heat wave? Or is it because we have to read EVERY DAY about Gordon Brown and David Cameron's charming lovely gorgeous right-on English seaside holidays? Is it because we're warned all the time of the hidden cost traps of flying Ryanair so we've finally been indoctrinated into thinking we want a home-grown holiday?

However, this we-love-England theme has been going on for some years – surely it's about to pass? There are only so many floral tents, camp sites, conker fights, nature hunts, crocheted tea cosies and Suffolk, Norfolk and Cornwall holidays we can obsess about. Perhaps next it'll be fashionable to sport a jet-set tan once more, hang out in the Emirates and look like a Eurotrash escapee from the 1978 Monaco Grand Prix. All I know is that in my heat-dazed stupor I begin to believe that the source of happiness lies in a dip in the sea. As long as it's not Weston-super-Mare.

'Sleep With Me' by Joanna Briscoe is published by Bloomsbury

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