Haven & Hell

Okay, so perhaps it was a little over-optimistic of me to expect this weekend's South Coast camping trip to be anything other than fucking disasterous. I'd done the Butlins malarkey way back.. and Pontins even wayer back.. and stupidly thought Haven was a slightly improved version of the same.. CHPs* with jobs, or something..

*That's 'Council House People', not 'Californian Highway Patrol' officers, as they are called by those less unPC than me. (ahh, pants! My Safari browser won't let me make this potentially offensive comment almost unnoticably small. sorry. :) )

Anyway, where was I..? Camping.. during the tail end of the hurricane that struck Brighton at the weekend. Probably Hurricane Chardonnay. Or to be precise, I was trying to help pack away an eight man tunnel tent that was doing it's very best to become a four man wind sail. Free flight to France, anyone?

This was preceded by a night spent hurling undercooked hotdoggery down a filthy, stinking campsite bog. And like that wasn't bad enough, some pyjama'ed hag was hovering outside the entrance waiting for the final throw. So that she might take a private poo. Probably a planned middle-of-the-night poo, come to think of it. Hah, don't suppose she expected me to return to the toilet after her exit(s) for round two of chuck the sausage down the sewer. Not a pleasant experience.

That evening's entertainment consisted of no bingo (as advertisied), children's games (Guess Your Daddy, etc), a band (that amusingly we were asked to "welcome back on the stage" for their encore despite them never leaving..) and a 'wedding party' style disco. Thankfully someone sat in front of me for 'Oops Upside Your Head' and by the time the Macarena came around, I really couldn't have given less of a shit what misshapes I was throwing.

So that really was my Haven experience. Not for the faint-hearted, and probably best left to the fat, hairy, two-sizes-too-small-football-shirt-wearing brigade. And their 'husbands'.