ON August 24, 2018, the sun blazed down on to the former Clacton Gazette offices in Jackson Road.

A large camera clutched in my hands, I walked the short distance to the beach to cover Clacton Airshow for the second time in my four-year career with the newspaper.

The first time I covered the show, in 2016, I was a trainee reporter and mainly spent the day worrying.

But in 2018, it was an utter joy, as I relaxed and absorbed the surroundings.

Everywhere people were smiling, the beaches packed with throngs of excited families.

Anyone I cared to approach was delighted to tell me what the airshow meant to them.

In the simplest terms, the show makes people happy. It is jaw-dropping spectacle, it is nostalgia, it is the hot sun and the cold ice cream, it is the old and new coming together.

It is memories of a childhood spent at the coast, or, for ex-pilots, of a career spent soaring through the air in a flying machine.

Above all, it is a day for celebrating all that makes Clacton great.

It is the most tight-knit community I have ever encountered, easily experienced through my short wander along the coast on that day in August, when tens of thousands of families laughed and chatted everywhere I looked.

Yes, the cancellation is awful, but let us use this sad news as a means of remembering why we love it so.