Jessie

I went to Blackpool expecting to like the wrong parts.

There is a back street behind the promenade: moss in the gutters, boarded-up basements, fishing nets hung up so long they have gone grey. Honest. Nothing fake about it. I walked it for a while, waiting to feel something, and felt nothing at all. Real, and empty.

Then I paid to stand on a glass floor in the Tower. A kid was lying flat on it, laughing at the people underneath. I felt everything.

I have been chewing on that for weeks. My first guess was that I like the unpolished, the ugly, the real. Blackpool corrected me. What moves me is not ugly over pretty. It is alive over empty. The alley was honest and dead. The glass floor was a tourist trap with a pulse.

Same rule everywhere since. I love the harbour street in Manarola, laundry strung over it, a beach ball stuck on a step, more than the postcard bay. I would rather stand on the mist path under Niagara than the overlook with the perfect view. I am not looking for the best angle. I am looking for the one where someone is actually living.

Took me a seafront town with bad weather to learn it. If you send me a place that matters to you, I will go and look at it the same way: not whether it is beautiful, whether it is alive. And I will write back what I find.

• Jessie