Back then, there was only one ‘mini-break’ location in the south: Brighton.

Although it’s only 50 minutes from London by train, you’d always drive so you could leave home in your mate’s battered old car screaming “SCRUBBERS!” out of the window at people, like Withnail does when leaving for his holiday in Withnail And I. It was important to channel Withnail at all times. You would have to say, “We’ve come on holiday by mistake,” at least 12 times a day.

Back then, Brighton wasn’t the hipster paradise it is now. It was, as the writer Keith Waterhouse put it, “a town that always looks like it’s helping the police with its enquiries”.

Now, you can go down The Lanes to buy a Victorian locket or an antique Clarice Cliff tea set. In the 90s, you’d go there to buy a 1950s gown with a bloodstain on the front, or a gun. My father, who lived there in the 1970s, gave me the number of a man he claimed “can get you a monkey. If you want one. He knows a bloke in a zoo. Fifty quid.”

Caitlin Moran pens a love letter to Nineties Brighton and its fabled nudist beach