I’M ALWAYS charmed by what Philip Larkin called the “miniature gaiety of the seaside”.

Let’s step out from a world of religious lunatics, austere governments and reality TV, and step out into an England which never stops giving.

Last week, for example, I stepped out into the village of Beer in Devon.

A cool blue sea lapped up against a pebbled beach, dotted with huts, deckchairs and boats.

Walk down the path which meets the coast and anyone can understand why so many dream of joining this community of fishermen, farmers, boat builders, bakers and butchers.

Up the hill, dinky white-washed shops sold colourful fishing nets, buckets and spades.

You can pick up a box of fudge or a stick of rock for the folks back home. Beer is delightful, timeless. And it boasts a punchy past which is crazier than golf.

Over a seafood lunch at the Dolphin Hotel I exchange glances with a portrait of Jack Rattenbury, the “Rob Roy of the West”.

The local fishing trade became his cover while he smuggled barrels of brandy off the East Devon coast in the early 1800s.

On one occasion this brawny chap made a prison escape disguised as a woman in a lace dress. His portrait keeps watch over failed scoundrels in the Dolphin Hotel.

Inquests were held here, with jurors lining up to inspect the dead. Rattenbury’s portrait also hangs in the Anchor Inn, whose past landlord Mr Northcott was hounded by an ice-cream seller named Mountstephen.

After five years in the navy Mountstephen’s only ambition was to become “a nuisance”.

He’d tricycle around the village shouting “whoopee” at the top of his voice all day long, accompanied by a black spaniel.

There was also dastardly Jack Bastone, a 49-year-old father of seven and veteran of the Great War, who in the 1930s lavished his affection on a spinster named Florrie Hookings.

They’d meet in the yard of Mutter’s fishmongers. Florrie, who wore a long, elegant fur coat, lived with her mother. She may have been the gossip of the village. All went well until she fell pregnant.

“Don’t tell your mother” Bastone exclaimed, “I’ll find you some powder to take.”

On March 2, 1936, he sat Florrie on a bale of straw. As she knocked back water to swallow the powder – which later turned out to be cane sugar – he slashed her throat with a fish knife, cutting a gash five inches deep.

“She was my best friend”, he told the court later. These aren’t tidal wave moments in history. But it all happened here in Beer.

The village has more stories than you could fit on to a thousand naughty postcards.

It’s left for me to sit uncomfortably on the beach and for you to look out to sea, both of us dreading the long drive back to Oxford.