Happiness is Butlins at Minehead

I’ve lately got into the habit of starting off a Saturday night out in a quiet pub at the top of the town. I like the draught Japanese lager and the ridiculous glasses it comes in. The pub is friendly enough, but I don’t get involved. I have two or three pints, nod thanks, and move on. But the last time I was in there, one of the regulars said did I want to go to a music festival at Butlins in Minehead next weekend? A crowd of them were going. Twenty bands. Blockheads, Bad Manners, Selector. Come; it’ll be a laugh, he said.

I arrived in the early evening of the festival’s second day. At the check-in counter, I was delighted to learn that I had been upgraded from a room only to an apartment. But where were my new pals? And how would I find them? I knew none of their surnames. Butlins at Minehead is the size of a small town. I had the phone number stored of the chap who’d invited me, but my phone was away at the menders.

The lads in the next apartment to mine were sitting out on the balcony playing a drinking game involving a plastic funnel and four feet of tubing. They were dressed as jockeys in yellow and mauve quartered silks. I made myself a nice cup of tea, then went for a wander around the site. On the footpaths between the rows of apartments and chalets, I encountered punks, mods, bikers and gangs of blokes dressed in bondage and fetish gear, or dressed as sexy nuns in fishnet stockings and suspenders, or as Playboy bunnies. Cross-dressing seemed to be the ultimate party statement.