Colm O'Regan: When beaches were much further away

Packing up the kids in the car and heading for the coast is far less of an adventure  and much less time-consuming these days

I call them The Unlockers. The unexpected object that releases an archive of memories from the past. Every so often, while rooting around in the ‘boxes of stuff’ at home, I find one of these unlockers. 

It’s never the object you expect either, not the one you see in films. An old teddy (they are all currently working with the next generation), a locket with a picture in it (I think there were way less of them made than we think) or a diary (I dare not open some of those pages).