First published in 2007 after a magical trip to a certain holiday camp in Somerset.
Last Bank Holiday! What a joy!
Can we come to some arrangement with the government and the Met Office? Instead of setting in stone the bank holiday dates at the beginning of the year, what about looking at the week forecast and if we see three days of blue sky, any three days….we immediately call them Saturday, Sunday and Bank Holiday Monday.
I am not sure what the weather was like down here as I was in sunny Somerset at a holiday camp at a football tournament. When I say sunny, I mean one hour of sunshine on the Saturday morning and then a monsoon swept down the M5 and stayed for the rest of the weekend.
I can’t mention the name of the camp for legal reasons but going onto the website I noticed that a load of Sun readers had gone there for £10.00 and had promptly given it the ‘worse camp’ in Britain award. Rough was not the word! Guantanamo Bay had a web link on the front page!
Driving into the camp, the first thing I noticed was the welcoming tourist sign, which read.. ‘Danger! Mud slides and quick sands’. A little marketing needed there! The second thing I saw was a family discarding the furniture from their chalet into a skip!
I then went looking for the FitzGeralds. Ratboy, the son and heir, and his team mates from Buckfastleigh Rangers had descended on ‘Camp Coldfitz’ the night before and already one of them had broken his arm…..and that was before the tournament started.
When I got there, I couldn’t make up my mind whether my chalet was a room with a toilet or a toilet with some room. Decorated by the set design team from Tenko, the bathroom had a sit down bath! It was two buttocks wide….not my buttocks but someone’s!
And so to bed…..on the pull down bed……which was like a giant sandwich toaster with pillows. I turned off the lamp, and the room got brighter! Outside, was a whacking great light which attracted the ducks!!! That and the rising water!
The next day, sensing a little tenseness in my manner, the enemy, the good lady wife, took me to the on site pub, The Queen Victoria, so named as it was last cleaned during her reign.
Then for a kebab! I couldn’t help notice that the bloke with the Philips Ladyshave, slicing off the meat was looking confused. I had seen it as well. Not matter how much he cut off the rotating slab of meat, it got bigger!
Saturday night was taken up with watching the scoring on Eurovision, not the singing, just the voting….. and then an early night! The main duck fight kicked off at 2.30am with a return grudge match at 4.15am!
I left on the Monday at about 40 mph. The enemy tried to make things better by reminding that we had been upgraded. We were club! Below us was standard and budget!
‘BUDGET! Are you sure they said budget?’ I muttered. ‘Or did they say budgie! You get a cage, a mirror and they change the paper on the floor every three weeks.
Yours free as a bird
Fitz
