Britain has some pretty little seaside towns, but the problem with pretty little towns is that people won't leave them alone.
It's Google's fault - for always providing links to articles with headlines like "Pretty little seaside town only an hour from London". Within seconds, Londoners who've been online are on their way to buy themselves a second home.
They arrive like middle-class Vikings, but in Range Rovers rather than longboats. They make it harder for locals to find a place to rent and, because they're seasonal Vikings, who leave as soon as the nice weather's over, the shops close. A vote in Whitby, a pretty little seaside town in Yorkshire, showed that the people there want to stop new houses being sold to second-homers.
Maybe we shouldn't think of second-homers as Vikings in Range Rovers, but (out of respect for the first Homer) as Greeks in wooden horses.
Is this too simplistic? Pretty little towns do have empty shops, but so do ugly big ones, and anyway, shops are always changing. In non-seaside towns, what started as a butcher's or a greengrocer's has now become a betting shop; in seaside towns, it's an art gallery. Sea air clearly makes tourists want to hang pictures on the walls of one of their homes.
Londoners know that art likes to fill a vacuum. Tate Modern, the gallery on the south bank of the River Thames, is located in a former power station. It's so large, you could almost fit a pretty little seaside town inside its entrance hall.
Unlike a lot of galleries at the seaside, Tate Modern doesn't generally have charming pictures of harbours and fishing boats on show. I once found a banana there. It had been placed on a shelf, and I couldn't tell whether it was a new acquisition or part of the attendant's packed lunch.
Little towns may now be used to losing their little shops and seeing them replaced by supermarkets, but they've also been losing banks. Does that really matter, though, now that everyone pays by card? It's not as if artists have to carry round bags full of watercolours and use them to pay for their shopping.
And if, for example, they use sunflower oil for their oil paintings, they at least have something to cook with if the card machine in the supermarket isn't working.
The art world is full of surprises: buildings that were banks have become shops that sell artwork, while buildings that have been decorated by Banksy - the artist whose identity is a secret - are themselves an artwork. The surprise murals he paints are so valuable, they turn the outside of a building into an art gallery.
That way, the inside is free to carry on being an empty shop - unless, of course, the greengrocer has left a banana inside.